Description
Why is Brave Translate so inept at translating fragments of pages—on macOS, at least? I struggle to come up with a single example when it works. Every time I select some non-English text and invoke Translate Selection to English from the context menu, it hopelessly shows an error without displaying any attempt at translating, even from a wrongly guessed language.
At first I thought it struggles with very short fragments (unable to detect the source language or something like that), but, as I kept trying using this feature, it became clear that it fails even for substantial pieces of text where other affordances of this kind are working perfectly fine (like, e.g., the macOS system-wide translation service available through the context menu for text areas in supporting apps across the system).
And even if does struggle detecting the language, why not to give the user some UI to specify the source and target language? Of course, if it fails for another reason, then it’s clearly a bug that should be fixed, as well.
Sometimes Brave refuses to translate a full page, too, but at least in that scenario the success rate is high enough to be usable in some cases, while with translating text fragments it’s rather abysmal in my experience. (However, I also do have a gripe with how full page translation fails when it does fail: It doesn’t allow to run the translation service if it misses that (the substantial portion of) the page is in a foreign language, it doesn’t allow to specify the source and target languages manually, etc.)
Steps to reproduce
Examples are plenty—just try using this feature for any kind of short-form content (like posts on social media).
For the sake of concreteness, here’s one:
-
Open the YouTube video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6vEb_uH6x0.
-
Select the meaty part of the video description (from the first paragraph that starts with “Avis aux fans…” till the one reading “Filmé le 3 février 2026 au Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers”).
-
Invoke Translate Selection to English from the context menu:
Actual result
The feckless error message stating “This selection couldn't be translated” is shown:
Expected result
The language of the fragment is automatically detected, and its translation into English is shown.
Alternatively, if it’s impossible to reliably detect the language of the selected text fragment, some kind of UI allowing the user to select the source and target languages is shown first, and then the translation for the selected pair is shown.
Or even better, a window with both language pair dropdowns and translation text area is shown from the get-go (with the languages guessed automatically upon opening), and the translated text is updated live when the users changes the languages.
Reproduces how often
Easily reproduced
Brave version (brave://version info)
Brave: 1.92.141 Chromium: 150.0.7871.128 (Official Build) (arm64)
Revision: 46424b300001f5de28636efa3286708a0cecefc8
OS: macOS Version 26.5.2 (Build 25F84)
Channel information
Reproducibility
Miscellaneous information
Funnily enough, on iOS version of Brave this feature works—but only because it’s not implemented in-house and the builtin iOS translation service is used instead, which does work fine for even small text fragments and provides a sensible UI for specifying the source and target languages on the fly on top of that.
Description
Why is Brave Translate so inept at translating fragments of pages—on macOS, at least? I struggle to come up with a single example when it works. Every time I select some non-English text and invoke Translate Selection to English from the context menu, it hopelessly shows an error without displaying any attempt at translating, even from a wrongly guessed language.
At first I thought it struggles with very short fragments (unable to detect the source language or something like that), but, as I kept trying using this feature, it became clear that it fails even for substantial pieces of text where other affordances of this kind are working perfectly fine (like, e.g., the macOS system-wide translation service available through the context menu for text areas in supporting apps across the system).
And even if does struggle detecting the language, why not to give the user some UI to specify the source and target language? Of course, if it fails for another reason, then it’s clearly a bug that should be fixed, as well.
Sometimes Brave refuses to translate a full page, too, but at least in that scenario the success rate is high enough to be usable in some cases, while with translating text fragments it’s rather abysmal in my experience. (However, I also do have a gripe with how full page translation fails when it does fail: It doesn’t allow to run the translation service if it misses that (the substantial portion of) the page is in a foreign language, it doesn’t allow to specify the source and target languages manually, etc.)
Steps to reproduce
Examples are plenty—just try using this feature for any kind of short-form content (like posts on social media).
For the sake of concreteness, here’s one:
Open the YouTube video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6vEb_uH6x0.
Select the meaty part of the video description (from the first paragraph that starts with “Avis aux fans…” till the one reading “Filmé le 3 février 2026 au Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers”).
Invoke Translate Selection to English from the context menu:
Actual result
The feckless error message stating “This selection couldn't be translated” is shown:
Expected result
The language of the fragment is automatically detected, and its translation into English is shown.
Alternatively, if it’s impossible to reliably detect the language of the selected text fragment, some kind of UI allowing the user to select the source and target languages is shown first, and then the translation for the selected pair is shown.
Or even better, a window with both language pair dropdowns and translation text area is shown from the get-go (with the languages guessed automatically upon opening), and the translated text is updated live when the users changes the languages.
Reproduces how often
Easily reproduced
Brave version (brave://version info)
Brave: 1.92.141 Chromium: 150.0.7871.128 (Official Build) (arm64)
Revision: 46424b300001f5de28636efa3286708a0cecefc8
OS: macOS Version 26.5.2 (Build 25F84)
Channel information
Reproducibility
Miscellaneous information
Funnily enough, on iOS version of Brave this feature works—but only because it’s not implemented in-house and the builtin iOS translation service is used instead, which does work fine for even small text fragments and provides a sensible UI for specifying the source and target languages on the fly on top of that.