Google brings a feature first seen on rival Edge to the Chrome browser

Chrome is about to get the selective text translation feature for web pages that rival Edge has supported for months.

Google has made several enhancements in recent months that boost the functionality of its Google Translate service, which rival Microsoft has been quick to take advantage of by adding for the first time a new text translation option available only to Edge users. Strangely, even though both web browsers are based on the same Google-developed Chromium engine, Chrome has lagged behind with the functionality offered.

Specifically, Microsoft Edge users have been able since a few months ago to select any portion of text on a web page to see it translated into another language of circulation without the rest of the page being altered. For Chrome users, however, there is only the Translate to… option, displayed in the right-click menu on the page. In addition to the fact that this function is sometimes not supported at all with the website being visited, it often leads to undesirable results, such as certain buttons not working or graphics not rendering correctly.

Tested for now with the Chrome Canary version, the new partial translation feature will avoid the above problems by translating only the portions of text you are directly interested in, leaving the rest of the page untouched. Like the full translation option, the selective translation feature will be available with any language supported by the Google Translate service. You will be able to change the display language using the three-dot menu displayed in the translation bubble.

Similar functionality has been added to the Google Lens service for Chrome since April, including the ability to copy/translate text from images.