Lingua: Universal Translator

Lingua: Universal Translator takes a deliberately minimal approach to web translation: instead of subscribing to a closed translation service, it sends the text you highlight to a GPT model using your personal OpenAI API key. Because the translation runs through a large language model rather than a conventional machine-translation engine, output tends to read naturally and can handle less common phrasing, while still being a straightforward text-in, text-out workflow.

The extension currently covers Spanish, French, German, Japanese and Chinese, along with support for the International Phonetic Alphabet — a niche feature that makes it useful for phonetic transcription and pronunciation study. You highlight a passage, pick the source language from a dropdown, and trigger transcription from the extension popup; results appear quickly without leaving the page you are reading.

Setup requires a few manual steps: create an OpenAI account, generate a secret key, and paste it into the extension's options page accessed from chrome://extensions. There is no account system, no dashboard and no bundled quota, so the entire experience is governed by your own API key and OpenAI's rate limits. The listing shows a small user base and a last update in early 2023, so treat it as a simple utility rather than a maintained translation suite.