The Bilingual Browsing Problem
Google Chrome features a very powerful built-in Google Translate integration. If it detects that you have navigated to a website written in a language different from your operating system’s default language, it will often automatically translate the entire page into English. While this is helpful for monolingual users browsing foreign stores, it is incredibly frustrating for bilingual users or language learners who actually want to read the original Spanish, French, or Japanese text. Having Chrome instantly erase the original language before you can read it forces you to manually click the URL bar to revert the translation every single time.
How to Disable Automatic Translation
You can turn off Chrome’s translation engine entirely, ensuring that every website you visit is displayed in its original, native HTML text exactly as the webmaster intended.
1. Open Google Chrome.
2. Click the three vertical dots in the top-right corner of the window.
3. Select Settings from the drop-down menu.
4. In the left-hand sidebar, click on Languages.
5. Look for the section labelled “Google Translate.”
6. You will see a toggle switch labelled Use Google Translate.
7. Click this toggle switch to turn it Off.
How to Customize Translation Rules
If you don’t want to disable the feature entirely—perhaps you want Chrome to translate Russian but leave your Spanish sites alone—you can create specific whitelist rules instead. Leave the main “Use Google Translate” toggle turned On. Look just below it for the “Never offer to translate these languages” list. Click Add languages, select the specific languages you are fluent in (e.g., Spanish and French), and add them to the list. Now, Chrome will ignore pages written in those languages, but will still helpfully translate languages you do not know.