Google Chrome might soon let you translate PDFs in the browser

While Chrome’s built-in translation for websites works well, it has one major drawback: It doesn’t work for PDFs. Google is now looking to change that, with presumably two ways to translate PDFs.

While browsing through flags on Chrome Canary, we came across a flag that says “enable-translate-pdf.” While we can’t confirm when it was added, the latest v155.0.8052.0 of Canary includes it.

You can view a screenshot of the flag below. The description says “Enables PDF translation in Chrome,” and mentions all the major operating systems on desktop.

I’ve checked whether it’s functional by opening a PDF that’s in another language. However, no option to translate the PDF showed up. I got the usual option to summarize the PDF with Gemini, and the other typical PDF annotation options.

Just in case Google has decided to add it to the Reading Mode, I also entered it via right-clicking. It gives me the option to change the text size or read the text aloud, but no translation option is present. In previous coverage, we detailed how Google is working on a “Translate” button in the Reading Mode for PDFs. We can’t really confirm whether they’re related features, but the option wasn’t available for us back then either.

The Gerrit commit code submission also doesn’t mention whether this flag is for the Reading Mode or in regular PDF view, so I’m assuming it’s for the normal one.

Furthermore, we’ve checked for this on both Windows and macOS. Enabling the flag makes no difference on both platforms at the time of writing.

If you want to translate a PDF right now, your options for now include extra, unnecessary steps. You could use Google Translate Documents, upload the PDF to Drive and then translate it via Google Docs, copy the content into Google Translate, or use a third-party extension. While these aren’t particularly difficult to do, it’s still some added friction.

In other Chrome news, v153 is now available to the public with various security fixes. More on that here.

We stand out from the tech-media crowd because we break news stories; we mainly bring you stuff that you won’t find anywhere in the mainstream tech media. Our stories have been picked up by some of the world’s most popular websites and media outlets—more info is available here.