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Minimal Translation

Chrome extension

Minimal Translation

Minimal Translation is a Chrome MV3 extension for inline translation, reading assistance, TTS, OCR, and configurable translation sources.

Install extension

Product Positioning

Minimal Translation is a Chrome extension for reading and translating web pages. It keeps the translation flow inside the current page, reducing copy-paste work, tab switching, and repeated visits to a separate translation site.

It is designed for English technical documentation, blogs, news sites, and other cross-language pages. After selecting a word, sentence, or paragraph, users can see the translation near the original text, or use the side panel for longer input.

Typical Scenarios

  • Understand unfamiliar words, long sentences, and terms while reading technical documentation.
  • Read article content with bilingual paragraph rendering.
  • Use TTS for the original text or the translated result.
  • Translate text inside images through the context menu.
  • Control where the extension runs with domain and URL rules.

Core Capabilities

  • Insert translation results near selected text.
  • Open a Chrome side panel from the toolbar or context menu.
  • Extract main page content and insert bilingual paragraph translations.
  • Show phonetics, part of speech, definitions, examples, and synonyms for English words.
  • Support term highlighting, pronunciation buttons, and English grammar hints.
  • Translate recognized text from images.
  • Support allowlists, blocklists, domain rules, and URL rules.

Translation and Speech Sources

The extension provides a free translation endpoint by default. Users can also configure model-backed translation sources, including local models, OpenAI, DeepSeek v4, Qwen, GLM, Gemini, Claude Code / Anthropic, and Xiaomi tab.

Speech settings support recommended mode, manual voice selection, speaking rate, and pitch. English word lookup uses a dictionary API, while image recognition and grammar hints depend on public services.

Installation and Entry Points

The public version is available from the Chrome Web Store. After installation, it can be opened from the browser toolbar, context menu, or side panel.

The older static product page remains available at translate_chrome_plugin for privacy policy, support information, and extension notes.

Boundaries

The public translation endpoint does not provide service-level stability. Model-backed sources require users to configure their own services, and the selected source does not automatically fall back to another source on failure. OCR and grammar hints use public services and are intended for reading assistance, not professional proofreading or high-reliability recognition.