Tapword Translator

Most translation extensions solve a browsing problem: you land on a page you can't read, you want the whole thing in your language, fast. Tapword solves the opposite problem — you can mostly read the page, and you want help at the exact moment you stall, without the page rearranging itself under you. That distinction drives every design choice. Translations are rendered as subtitles directly beneath the selected text, so the original stays visible and the page layout is untouched. Tapping anywhere inside a word auto-expands the selection to full word boundaries, which removes the fiddly drag-to-select step that makes most inline tools annoying on a trackpad. Selecting one word yields a dictionary card with phonetics, part of speech, definitions, and example sentences; selecting a sentence flips to LLM-backed translation that pulls in the surrounding paragraph for context. That split — dictionary for vocabulary, AI for meaning — maps cleanly onto how language learners actually study a text. The BYOK path is the strongest technical argument. Point Tapword at your own OpenAI, DeepSeek, or Moonshot key and the translation request never touches Tapword's servers. The project is fully open-source and the site states plainly that when you do use the official cloud service, requests pass through Tapword's servers and content is not stored. Either way you get no account, no login, no registration — you install and go. Where it doesn't fit: there is no full-page translation yet, and the site labels it "coming soon", so anyone whose workflow is "translate this whole article at once" should look elsewhere today. Chrome 88+, Edge 88+, and Firefox 90+ covers mainstream desktop browsers, but there's nothing here for mobile. And because translation quality in BYOK mode is only as good as the model you plug in, your results vary with the key you supply. For close reading — news in a language you're learning, academic papers, technical docs where a reflowed page would break the code blocks you're trying to follow — this is a well-judged, genuinely free tool.