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Comment by jsheard | Hacker News Reader

I assume it means they only translate what's in the HTML, not anything that's added via Javascript later.

Is that a relevant username, or is J your initial? I can't quite place what "JavaScript heard" would mean. I've wondered before but there's no contact in your profile and now it felt at least somewhat related to the comment itself, sorry for being mostly off-topic

It's an initial :p

Mystery solved! Thanks for obliging my curiosity :)

Indeed, that's what would make most sense to me.

I also strongly suspect the way they're able to make it free is by caching the results, so each translation only happens one time regardless of how many requests for the page happen. If they translated dynamic content, they couldn't (safely) cache the results.

I don't think JS vs HTML would make any difference to caching.

If they are caching by URL you can have dynamic HTML generation or a JS generated page that is the same on every load.

If you are caching by the text then you can do the same for HTML or JS generated (you are just reading the text out of the DOM when the JS seems done).

Yeah, js can be static or dynamic, so its not just whether it's js that matters. It's whether the content is added or modified after initial rendering that makes it dynamic.

Most js heavy pages retrieve data from APIs, and the static parts of the code is just layout and menus, which isn't the part that people care most about translating. Thus why GP said "added via Javascript later." The important part of that isn't the "Javascript" , it's the "later."

Ah, that makes sense. In my head it sounded like server-side dynamic content OR not wanting to translate LLM outputs, neither of which makes sense or is possible.

that's what I think too, which kinda makes sense since it's a page, and not a browser plugin. If they implemented a browser plugin that would do what Google recently removed from their plugin, that would be a killer feature. (assuming they can then translate all html as it comes in)

Brave browser does it already though, but sometimes it's unusably slow.

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