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Offline translation that actually stays offline.
“Works offline” usually means a smaller, worse mode of a cloud product — one that quietly goes back online when it can. Here is the honest landscape, including where each approach is the right choice.
The approaches
| Approach | Example | What you actually get |
|---|---|---|
| Cloud app with offline packs | Google Translate (mobile) | Downloadable packs for phones, distinctly lower quality than the online mode — and the app prefers the cloud whenever it has a connection. |
| Browser-local page translation | Firefox | Genuinely local, and good — but it translates web pages only. No documents, no PDFs, no text box you can paste into. |
| Platform translator | Apple Translate | On-device on Apple hardware, around 20 languages. If you live entirely in that ecosystem it is a fine answer; it ends at the ecosystem’s edge. |
| Native offline suite | Lingvanex | Installed software with offline models. Real offline capability, sold as a paid product per platform. |
| Full product in the browser | Traxlate | One ~2 GB install, then the entire product — text, 12 document formats, PDFs, subtitles, dubbing, glossary, memory — runs offline in the browser you already have. |
What “offline” means here
After the one-time pack install, Traxlate does not have a cloud mode to fall back to. There is no setting that re-routes your text to a server when the model finds a sentence hard — the fallback that other products call a feature is the leak this product exists to close. On a plane, behind a corporate firewall, in a village with no signal: the same engine, the same quality.
And it stays yours. No subscription can switch off a pack you already installed — cancelling Pro loses you sync and the API, never translation.
The honest costs
- The download is real. About 2 GB, once. That is what a translation engine that doesn’t phone home actually weighs; anything dramatically smaller is either translating pages only or cutting quality. The guide breaks down exactly what gets installed.
- 66 languages, not 130. Of those, 18 are the ones we tune and measure hardest. We don’t count languages we can’t do well — if yours is not on the list, the app refuses rather than guessing badly, which we think is the less annoying of the two failures.
- It needs a current desktop-class browser. On a device that cannot run the engine, the page says so plainly rather than failing halfway through the download.
Choose something else if…
- You only ever translate web pages in place — Firefox’s built-in local translation does that well, for free.
- You need a quick phrase on a phone with no space to spare — Google’s offline packs are small and serviceable for travel.
- You are all-Apple and your languages are in Apple’s ~20 — the built-in translator is already on your device.
If you need the whole job done offline — documents, PDFs, subtitles, your own glossary — that is the product this site is about. If you are weighing us against a cloud service instead, read the DeepL comparison.