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
    39 Shirts &#8211; Leaving Mozilla

    In 2001 I had just graduated from a small town high school and headed off to a small town college. I found myself in the quaint computer lab where the substandard computers featured two browsers: Internet Explorer and Mozilla. It was this lab where I fell...

  • By
    Responsive Images: The Ultimate Guide

    Chances are that any Web designers using our Ghostlab browser testing app, which allows seamless testing across all devices simultaneously, will have worked with responsive design in some shape or form. And as today's websites and devices become ever more varied, a plethora of responsive images...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    MooTools Star Ratings with MooStarRating

    I've said it over and over but I'll say it again:  JavaScript's main role in web applications is to enhance otherwise boring, static functionality provided by the browser.  One perfect example of this is the Javascript/AJAX-powered star rating systems that have become popular over the...

  • By
    Better Pull Quotes with MooTools

    Chris Coyier authored a post titled Better Pull Quotes: Don't Repeat Markup a while back. In his post he created great-looking pull quotes without repeating any content -- instead he uses jQuery to dynamically create the pull quotes. The following is the...

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!