Safari's webpage translation feature is rolling out to more countries

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Macos Big Sur Preview Safari Hero
Macos Big Sur Preview Safari Hero (Image credit: Rene Ritchie)

What you need to know

  • Some people in France and Sweden are seeing the translation feature appear in Safari.

Apple's webpage translation feature appears to be rolling out to more and more people worldwide, with reports of its arrival in France and Sweden now being reported.

According to iPhoneSoft and MacRumors, users in both countries are now able to take a foreign webpage and translate it into their native language right from within Safari. The feature was first announced during WWDC in June with iOS 14 and macOS Big Sur supporting it.

Safari analyses each web page you visit to determine its language. This determination is made entirely on your device. If the web page can be translated to any of your preferred languages, you can choose to translate it. If you translate, Safari will send the web page's contents (including the full text) to Apple's servers for translation. After the translation is complete, Apple will discard the contents of the web page.

The current list of languages supported is limited, although Apple will presumably be adding more in due course. At the time of writing Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish are all supported.

It's worth noting that no software update seems to be needed to make this feature work, so long as users are running iOS 14 and macOS Big Sur or later. Apple is able to enable the feature remotely based on the user's location.

Oliver Haslam
Oliver Haslam
Contributor

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too. Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.