How to translate any webpage into 20+ languages
Chrome and Edge have Google Translate baked in, and it works fine for menus and short blurbs. For anything with nuance — technical docs, news, story writing, code comments in a language you do not read — a context-aware AI translation is dramatically better. Here is how to use one.
Languages supported
WriterPi can translate to and from Hindi, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, Portuguese, Russian, Korean, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Turkish, Vietnamese, Thai, Indonesian, Swahili, Hebrew, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Bengali, Gujarati, Punjabi, and Urdu. Plus English of course.
How to translate a whole page
- Open the page you want translated.
- Click the WriterPi icon in your Chrome toolbar.
- Turn on the Page toggle at the bottom of the sidebar.
- Type "translate this page into Spanish" (or whichever language you need). Send.
- The translated version appears in the sidebar. Copy it, save it as PDF, or export as text.
How to translate just a selection
Sometimes you only want a paragraph translated, not the whole page:
- Highlight the text you want translated on the page.
- Right-click and pick "WriterPi" from the menu.
- Ask "translate this into French" in the sidebar.
- Get the translation.
Why this beats plain Google Translate for real content
Chrome's built-in Translate is fast and free, but it translates word by word without understanding context. That is fine for a menu ("chicken with rice"), less fine for anything nuanced. Two examples of what WriterPi's context-aware translation gets right that plain machine translation gets wrong:
Idioms
Google Translate turns the Hindi phrase "नौ दो ग्यारह होना" into "become nine-two-eleven" — a literal, meaningless translation. WriterPi understands it means "to flee" or "run away" and translates accordingly.
Technical terms
The Japanese word 「引き継ぎ」 (hikitsugi) can mean "handover", "succession", "takeover", "transfer of responsibility", or "onboarding depending on context. Word-by-word tools guess. Context-aware tools read the surrounding paragraph and pick the right one.
Useful translation prompts
- "Translate this to Hindi in casual conversation style, not formal news style"
- "Translate this Japanese paragraph and explain any idioms you had to interpret"
- "Translate this into Spanish for Latin America, not Spain"
- "Give me a rough translation plus the three most important sentences translated more carefully"
- "Translate this and rewrite it to sound natural in the target language, not word-for-word"
Common mistakes
- Forgetting to attach the page. If the Page toggle is off, WriterPi cannot see what needs translating. Turn it on before you ask.
- Asking for a huge page at once. For pages over about 3,000 words, ask for the summary in the target language rather than a full translation. It is faster, cheaper, and usually what you actually wanted.
- Trusting a rough translation for legal or medical work. AI translations are excellent for reading and understanding. They are not certified for legal filings or medical records.