This guide is aimed at international students who want to access information on webpages which is only available in Danish. The guide will show you how to use the bulit-in translation tools in some of the most common browsers.
Translation of webpages
As an international student in Denmark you will probably encounter online ressources in Danish without translation. Even at VIA, some guides in the Danish guides library (vejledninger.via.dk) are not available in the guides library in English (guides.via.dk).
Recently, translating tools have been added to many browsers. The quality is continously improving due to AI-based technology. This means that it is becoming more and more sensible not to translate webpages into versions in other languages that may not be needed. The translation can be done on demand by you into whatever language you may prefer. Below, you will find instructions on how to do this in the most common browsers.
Before you start, please remember that even if you can make the browser translate into your native language, the quality of a translation to English may be better. The translating tools are trained on enormous quantities of data. The more data, the better training and quality, and more than half the content on webpages around the world is in English. Also, text in screenshots is not translated, but you can often find the right content from the placement or highlights.
Right-click somewhere on the page where you want to translate. Choose Translate to English.
This option may be set to another language than English.
If you want to change this option in the right-click menu to another language, do as follows.
Enter a webpage that enables Immersive Reader (eg. any article on Wikipedia). Choose the Immersive Reader icon in the address field.
The page will now appear in the simpler setup characteristic for Immersive Reader. In the top right corner, choose Reading preferences. Then choose the language you want from the dropdown list and start the translation by turning on the Translate entire page-button.
This will translate the page, but it will also cause the option in the right-click menu in Edge to change to the chosen language. Even after restarting Edge, this setting will remain the same, until you translate a page in Immersive reader into another language again.
Right-click somewhere on the page where you want to translate. Choose Translate to English.
You can also choose to activate Google Translate in Chrome. Choose the three dots in the upper right corner, scroll down and choose Settings.
Choose Languages in the left side menu and scroll down to the bottom of the page and activate Google Translate.
You can now choose a preferred language to have pages translated into. If you choose another language than English, this will change the right-click menu option mentioned above to the preferred language.
You can also set up automatic translation of all pages in a specific language, and you can ask Google Translate never to suggest translation of other languages. Any language chosen as preferred will automatically appear on the 'never' list.
If you have chosen automatic translation of Danish, all pages in Danish will be translated. You can switch between the original and the translation from the Google Translate icon in the address field. Additional options are available in the three dot menu.
In the upper right corner choose the hamburger menu (the three horizontal lines). Then choose Translate page.
You will now be able to choose the source language and the target language. To translate the current page choose Translate.
Feedback
We would like your feedback on using translation tools in general and especially on the guides library (vejledninger.via.dk). If you have feedback, please send it to [email protected] describing details and examples as specifically as possible.