Brave Software, the San Francisco-based company behind the privacy-focused browser Brave, announced earlier this week that it has added more than 90 languages to its Brave Translate tool, bringing the total number of languages offered on the platform up to 108.
Brave, a browser based on Google’s open-source Chromium browser, places a particular emphasis on user privacy, blocking any advertisement that depends on trackers. While Chromium has a native translation service, the company launched Brave Translate to ensure the privacy of its users. Currently, Brave Translate is only available for desktop and Android, however the company noted in its announcement on Tuesday that an iOS version is in the works.
“Brave Translate is privacy-preserving and enables users to privately translate websites in over 100 languages, without exposing browsing activity,” the browser’s developers wrote in an Oct. 25 blog post. “Brave uses a self-hosted server and the Lingvanex translation engine to power translations, which means no caching, and no feeding your translation requests to privacy-threatening models.”
When a user translates something through Chromium’s translation service, that data goes to Google’s API, which could lead to a breach in privacy if a user inputs confidential information. Up until recently, Brave users had to rely on third-party extensions like Google Translate to automatically translate certain content. In order to address the potential privacy concerns associated with other programs, Brave partnered with Lingvanex to launch its own privacy-oriented translation service earlier this year.
Initially, the feature only allowed users to translate content in 15 different languages. With the recent update, however, Brave Translate now features a total of 108 languages, a total more comparable to some of the more mainstream free machine translation services like Google Translate.
“Brave Translate works quickly and efficiently, providing high quality translation without relying on Big Tech,” the company wrote. “It’s just one more way that the Brave browser continues to differentiate itself from the competition and put users first.”
