Comparing BothLang vs. Browser Built-in Translation
It's a fair question. Chrome, Edge, and most modern browsers already ship with a "translate this page" button, and it costs nothing. So why would anyone install a separate extension just to read Reddit? I asked myself the same thing before I built one, and the honest answer is that built-in translation is great for the thing it was designed for — and Reddit isn't that thing.
The browser translator was built to handle a news article: one block of text, written once, sitting still on the page. Reddit is the opposite of that. It's a living document that keeps loading more content as you scroll, it's stuffed with usernames and code and formatting that shouldn't be touched, and the most interesting part is buried in nested comment threads that only appear when you expand them. That's where the gap opens up.
What full-page translation gets wrong on Reddit
Run the browser's translator on a Reddit thread and the first thing you'll notice is that it translates everything, indiscriminately. Usernames get mangled. Code snippets in r/programming come out as nonsense. The layout sometimes shifts or breaks because the translated text doesn't fit where the original sat. It's a blunt instrument, and Reddit is a page that rewards a more careful touch.
BothLang was built specifically for this. It knows what's a post and what's a comment, what's a username and what's actual content, so it translates the parts you came to read and leaves the structure alone. The page still looks like Reddit. You're not fighting a broken layout to get to the discussion.
Reading in one language versus two
The browser translator shows you one language at a time. Once the page is translated, the original is gone unless you toggle the whole thing back, and then your translation is gone. If you're just trying to get the gist, fine. But if you're using Reddit to learn a language — and a lot of people are — that constant toggling is exhausting and it kills the thing that actually helps you improve.
BothLang has a bilingual mode for exactly this. You see the original sentence and the translation right beneath it, together, so you can connect the foreign phrasing to its meaning without losing either one. That side-by-side view is where vocabulary starts to stick, and it's something a one-language-at-a-time translator simply can't give you.
Keeping up with content that keeps loading
Here's the one that quietly drives people up the wall. The browser's translation is a static pass over whatever was on the page when you hit the button. Scroll down, load more comments, expand a buried thread, and that new content shows up untranslated — or the translator glitches trying to catch up. On a site built around endless scrolling and collapsible threads, that's most of the page.
Because BothLang is integrated into how Reddit actually behaves, it notices when new comments appear and translates them as they come in. You scroll, you expand a thread, and it just keeps working. You're never left staring at a wall of untranslated replies wondering why the translation stopped.
So which should you use?
If you only need to skim a foreign news site once in a while, the built-in translator is genuinely all you need — don't install anything. But if you want to read Reddit, follow the arguments, learn from the comments, and pick up the language along the way, a tool built for the job beats a general-purpose one every time. That's the whole reason BothLang exists.
Try it on a thread you'd normally skip and see how different the two actually feel. 🌍