Full Page Translation of Forum Posts in German

I try to follow the German-language posts here but my German is quite poor. Here is my recent experience with a full page translator, adapted from my notes.

The Basics:
The LingvaNex translator (lingvanex.com) is built-in to my browser (Vivaldi 5.6, Chrome-based, running on Windows 7). There are also external versions of LingvaNex for other browsers.

In Vivaldi, I open the side panel with F4 and click the Translate tab symbol. I then I set the language detection drop-down value to German or leave it at Automatic (the default).

To translate a full page I simply right-click on a link to a forum page in German and choose "Open Link in New Tab". The first time I did this I was prompted to "always translate?" and I accepted the prompt. From then on full page translation of German posts was automatic after each "Open Link in New Tab" command (but see below for caveats, exceptions, and recommended settings).

The translate symbol may appear over quoted text that was skipped during the initial full page translation. If so, then clicking on it will usually translate that text. The translate symbol also appears on the browser's address bar when the current page has been translated. If you click on it there, you can choose to revert (i.e., undo) the latest translation. Sometimes the translate symbol appears over text that does not need to be translated, which is obviously a bug.

Performance & Settings:
The full page translations preserve all page formatting. The screen shot below shows a simple example, with the red arrow added by me.

Translation accuracy is acceptable, at least to me. While the wording is sometimes awkward the meaning is usually clear enough.

Certain errors are inevitable. For example "tag" is sometimes (but not always) rendered as "day" when referring to music file tags.

Sometimes a portion of text on a page is not translated initially. Usually all that is needed is to scroll the page up and down with the mouse wheel to trigger translation of that portion. If that fails, select the text with the mouse and the translation will appear in the Translate panel on the left. No need for pasting or for any other command.

The language auto-detect feature fails on a few Mp3tag forum pages. This is a known problem with multilingual sites. If auto-detect fails, try specifying the source language as German in the Translate panel. That will need to be done only once in your Vivaldi session.

There are also internal settings that affect auto-detect performance. For English users, go to vivaldi://translate-internals and set both entries in the "Override" box to en.

Procedures:
I found only one forum page where full page translation failed: Deutsch / German - Mp3tag Community. There I must select the text via Ctrl+A, followed by a click on the page outside of the selection. The Translate panel will then show the selection in English.

Normally I avoid that problematic page and instead start from the "Latest" page (Mp3tag Community), where I use one of these two methods:

  1. Right-click on an individual topic heading in German and invoke "Open Link in New Tab".

  2. Click on the Categories block near the page top to open the Categories page. Then right-click on Allgemein ("General") in the Deutsch section and choose "Open Link in New Tab". That gives me a single full page translation of all Allgemein topic headings. Then I can use "Open Link in New Tab" to translate specific topics of interest.

Conclusions:
Vivaldi describes its translator as a "work in progress". I agree but for my purposes it is already quite useful and very convenient. It's not perfect but most of the time it does what I want it to do with a minimum of effort on my part.

There are complaints in the Vivaldi user forum about accuracy, especially with less common and non-European languages. I make no judgment about those because my tests were done only with German and English. And I did not try using the German version of Vivaldi to translate full pages of English into German.

The Vivaldi browser (including LingvaNex) for Windows, Mac, Linux and Android:

Help basics for the Translate panel:

The user forum for Vivaldi for Windows: