Mate Translate for Firefox

Mate Translate is a cross-browser extension for Firefox, Chrome, and Opera that allows you to accurately and conveniently translate words and phrases on the fly.

Usually, with extensions such as these, it all comes down to two important factors: how good is the translation service that powers them and how good is their integration with the browser in question.

Well, in the case of Mate Translate for Firefox, both of these boxes seem to be ticked, as you only need to select a piece of text and press the SHIFT+T key combo to obtain an accurate translation for any word or phrase.

Even before you actually give its translation features a spin, it might be a good idea to check out the extension's UI first. As is the case with most Firefox extensions, it lives in the browser's toolbar, right in between the address bar and the hamburger menu.

From the main window, you can choose the target languages, you can actually translate words and phrases, access a useful phrasebook, unpin the extension's window from the toolbar, view your latest translations, but most importantly, you can access the app's settings section.

Actually, this is the fastest and most obvious way of discovering most of what this extension has to offer. For instance, you can configure it to perform quick translation upon double-clicking any word, to show transliterations (useful in the case of languages with different alphabets such as Russian or Chinese), and to suggest human translation.

There's also a Smart translations option that you can enable, choose the default language pair and activate or disable the context menu or all adjacent tooltips if you do so desire.

Mate Translate is a pretty compelling extension that surely comes in handy for all users looking for a quick and efficient way of translating text while they're browsing.

However, the Firefox version of the extension is not without faults. For instance, during our tests, we have discovered that the text-to-speech feature does not work.