Prevent Chrome from Translating a Page

By  on  

A while back I shared my favorite Google Chrome extension:  Google Art Project.  I've enjoyed seeing beautiful art when I open a new tab -- it's brought genuine happiness to my day, however small that happiness may be.  About a week ago, however, the art presented had a non-English name and so the Chrome "translate" bar dropped down every time I opened a new tab.  And since the artwork rotates daily, Chrome was super slow that day. It made me ask:  is there a way to prevent the translate bar from displaying? The answer is yes!

The answer comes in the form of a <meta> tag:

<meta name="google" value="notranslate">

I wish the Google Art Project developers would implement this tag so I could get a new tab opened without delay when the artwork has a non-English title.  It is also handy that developers can prevent the toolbar from displaying on their sites -- not that I can think of why.  Anyways, thought I'd share this with you.

Recent Features

  • By
    Write Better JavaScript with Promises

    You've probably heard the talk around the water cooler about how promises are the future. All of the cool kids are using them, but you don't see what makes them so special. Can't you just use a callback? What's the big deal? In this article, we'll...

  • By
    Animated 3D Flipping Menu with CSS

    CSS animations aren't just for basic fades or sliding elements anymore -- CSS animations are capable of much more.  I've showed you how you can create an exploding logo (applied with JavaScript, but all animation is CSS), an animated Photo Stack, a sweet...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    JavaScript Copy to Clipboard

    "Copy to clipboard" functionality is something we all use dozens of times daily but the client side API around it has always been lacking; some older APIs and browser implementations required a scary "are you sure?"-style dialog before the content would be copied to clipboard -- not great for...

  • By
    Introducing LazyLoad 2.0

    While improvements in browsers means more cool APIs for us to play with, it also means we need to maintain existing code.  With Firefox 4's release came news that my MooTools LazyLoad plugin was not intercepting image loading -- the images were loading regardless of...

Discussion

  1. I also wish the Google Art Project Developers would implement this in their Google chrome to speed up things. Thanks for sharing.

  2. One of the things I nag browser makers on is documentation. I was curious to see if this was officially documented and it looks like it is:

    https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/79812?hl=en

    There were some other interesting notes on that page too.

  3. Oumar FALL

    I whish this snippet be in HTML5 Boilerplate :)

  4. You can use a userscript that adds this meta.

  5. Google Chrome will also translate iframes on a page that contains content not in the browser default language.

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!