Hover Translation
Translate the paragraph under your pointer, or the whole article around it, with one key, and put it back the same way.
Hover translation is for the part you stumbled on, not the page you are reading. You point at a paragraph, press a key, and that paragraph alone comes back translated. Nothing else on the page changes.
Two screens, one feature
This is the part that catches people out: the switch and the key live in different places.
| Half | Where it is |
|---|---|
| Whether it runs | Options → Translation → Page Translation → Hover translation |
| Which key | Options → Shortcuts → Paragraph translation |
If pressing the key does nothing, check the switch. If the switch is on and nothing happens, you are probably pressing the wrong key. The setting row itself carries a link across to the Shortcuts page for exactly this reason.
Turning it on
The Hover translation section on the Page Translation screen — the same screen shown in Page and Paragraph Translation — has two switches.
Enable turns the feature on. It is off on a fresh install.
Always request a fresh translation makes hover translation skip the cache: it re-translates the paragraph even when a translation is already stored, and overwrites the stored one with the new result. Leave it off for ordinary reading. Turn it on when you are comparing providers or prompts and need each trigger to be a real request rather than a replay.
Choosing the key
On the Shortcuts page, Paragraph translation is a dropdown rather than a shortcut recorder, because what it takes is one held key — not a combination.
| Choice | How you trigger it |
|---|---|
| ⌃ Control | Point at the paragraph and press the key |
| ⌥ Alt | Same |
| ⇧ Shift | Same |
| ` backtick | Same — useful if the modifiers clash with a site's own shortcuts |
| Click and hold | Press and hold the left mouse button on the paragraph instead of pressing a key |
The default is Control.
With a key, a tap translates the paragraph the moment you let go. Hold the key instead, and after half a second a gray ring outlines what letting go will translate. The ring follows the pointer, gliding from block to block, and letting go translates exactly what it shows.
Pressing any other key while the key is down cancels it — Esc is the natural one — and so does a click or switching windows. Ctrl + F stays a search, and Ctrl-click still opens a link.
With click and hold, hold the button still. Moving the pointer more than a few pixels cancels, which keeps selecting text and dragging links working normally.
Long press means press-and-hold the mouse, and it belongs to this feature alone. The selection toolbar has no long-press variant — it needs text you have already selected.
Either way, the trigger is ignored while your cursor is in a text box, so it will not fire as you type.
Translating a whole section
The block under your pointer is not always a paragraph. Rest the pointer in the margin of an article — beside the text, or in the gap between two paragraphs — and the block there is the article itself. Hold the key and the ring grows to wrap every paragraph in it; let go and they translate together, while the sidebar, header and comments around it stay as they were.
This is the quickest way to translate just the part of a page you are reading when full-page translation would catch the sidebar too. Hold first and look at the ring before you let go: if it wraps more or less than you meant, move the pointer until it fits, or press Esc.
Triggering it again
Trigger the same paragraph or section a second time and its translation is removed. The paragraph is a toggle, not a one-way action, which makes it safe to use liberally while reading.
What it inherits
Hover translation is page translation applied to one node, so it uses the same settings as the rest of the page: the same provider, the same translation mode, the same display style, the same prompts, and the same glossary.
The filters come with it too. A paragraph shorter than your minimum character or word threshold, or already in your target language, is skipped here exactly as it would be during a full-page run — pointing at it does not override those rules. If a specific paragraph refuses to translate, that is where to look; both settings are in Translation Control.
Hover translation is the cheapest way to read a mostly-comprehensible page: translate the three sentences that lost you instead of the whole article, and the rest stays as the author wrote it.