Privacy
What “on-device translation” actually means
· 2 min read
The phrase “on-device” is doing a lot of quiet work in translation marketing. It is usually true in the narrow sense — some model really does run on your phone — and misleading in the sense that matters: the app still reaches for a server the moment the local model meets a sentence it finds hard, and “hard” is exactly the sentence you most wanted to keep private.
The tell is the fallback
Almost every “offline” translator has a cloud mode it silently prefers when it has a connection. The offline pack is a smaller, weaker model shipped for the plane and the subway; the good model lives on a server. So the honest test of “on-device” is not “can it work offline?” but “is there any path that sends my text to a server at all?” If the answer is yes, your text leaves your device on exactly the schedule you cannot see.
Traxlate has no such path. After a one-time language-pack install, translation runs in the browser you already have, and there is no server mode to fall back to — not for a hard sentence, not for a rare language, not ever. That is not a privacy policy we promise to honour; it is the absence of code that could do otherwise. Read the exact claim on the privacy page.
Why the download is big, and why that is the point
A translation engine that never phones home has to carry the whole model with it. That is why the install is around 1.5 GB and not 15 MB. Anything dramatically smaller is either translating web pages only or quietly cutting quality — and the small size is a symptom of the server it is leaning on.
The trade is real and worth naming: you pay once, in bytes, for a tool that then owes nothing to anyone. No subscription can switch off a pack you already installed. The offline-translation comparison lays the options out side by side.
How to check any translator yourself
- Turn off Wi-Fi and mobile data, then translate. If quality drops, the good model was on a server.
- Watch the network tab in your browser while you translate. On-device means zero requests carrying your text.
- Ask what happens to a sentence the model finds hard. If the answer is “we send it to the cloud”, that is your text leaving.
You can run that last test on this site right now: install a pack on the Translate page, pull your network cable, and keep translating.