Translating inside Microsoft Word

If you write in Word, the round trip through a translation site is the slow part: copy out, paste in, translate, paste back, then repair the formatting it lost. The Word add-in removes that trip. Traxlate appears as a tab in Word's ribbon, next to Home and Insert, and translates the document where it already is.

It comes with the Windows app. There is nothing separate to download — install Traxlate for Windows from the downloads page and the tab is part of it.

What it does

Translate a selection. Select a paragraph, a heading, a table cell, and it is replaced by the translation. Everything Word knows about that text — the style, the bold, the list level — stays as it was.

Translate the whole document. The add-in walks the document and replaces each paragraph in turn, so the result is your document in another language rather than a wall of unformatted text. Headings stay headings, tables stay tables, and numbered lists keep their numbers.

Keep your tone consistent. A long document translated a paragraph at a time can drift: the same term rendered three ways across forty pages. The add-in reuses the first translation it settled on for a repeated term, so page 90 agrees with page 1. Your own glossary, if you have one, always wins over that.

What it does not do

The tab is deliberately thin. The part of it that lives inside Word does not read your document and does not translate anything — its only job is to draw the tab and open the pane. The translation happens in the pane, which talks to the Traxlate app already running on your machine.

That split is the point. A Word add-in *could* read every document you open. Ours reads nothing, so "the text never leaves this machine" stays a fact about how it is built rather than a promise you have to take on trust. The privacy model explains the same boundary for the rest of the product.

Requirements

• Windows. Mac Word does not support this kind of add-in; on a Mac, use the desktop app or the browser alongside Word.
• The Traxlate desktop app, running. The tab opens a pane; the pane needs the app for the engine.
• A language pack for the languages you are working in, installed once. See language packs.

If the tab is not there

The add-in is new, and Word is particular about the add-ins it loads.

1. Restart Word. Word reads its add-in list at startup, so a Word that was open during the install has not seen it yet.
2. Check it is enabled. In Word: File → Options → Add-ins, then choose *COM Add-ins* in the Manage box and press Go. Traxlate should be listed and ticked.
3. Check the app is running. If the tab is there but the pane is empty, the pane cannot reach the app. Start Traxlate and open the pane again.

If it is still missing, tell us which Word version you have (File → Account → About Word) and what step 2 showed. That is the fastest route to a fix, and it is a report we want — this is a recent addition and real Word installations vary more than any test can.

Working without the add-in

Nothing is lost if you would rather not use it. Dropping a `.docx` into Documents translates the whole file and gives you a `.docx` back with its formatting intact, and that path works the same on Windows, Mac and Linux.