Translating a paragraph usually goes like this: copy it, open a translator in another tab, paste, copy the result, switch back to the document, paste again. Do that a few times while drafting an email to an overseas colleague and most of the effort goes into moving between windows.
TL;DR: Select the text, then Review > Translate > Translate Selection, and choose the language you want in the Translator pane.
Steps
- Select the text you want translated. On the Review tab, click Translate, then Translate Selection.
- The Translator pane opens on the right. In the target language box, type the language you want (for example, English) and pick it from the list. The translation appears in the pane straight away.
- To get another language, change only the target language, for example to Japanese. The translated text updates without reselecting anything.
The language you choose is remembered for next time, so repeat translations into the same language skip step 2.
Checked in the free Word for the web.
Where it helps
It fits the small jobs: checking what a paragraph from a partner says, drafting a reply in a second language, or comparing how a sentence reads in two languages. You stay in the document the whole time.
Things to watch
Machine translation is a starting point. Read the output before you send it, and pay extra attention to names, numbers, dates and product or legal terms, which are the places where a wrong word causes real trouble.
The text you select is sent to Microsoft's translation service to be translated. If your company has rules about confidential documents and cloud services, check them before translating anything sensitive.
If you want the whole file in another language, desktop Word's Translate menu also has a Translate Document option, which creates a translated copy instead of showing it in the pane.
Compared with scripting it
Developers who need to translate many files usually go through a translation API (Microsoft's own Azure AI Translator is one option) and loop over documents in code. That is the right tool for batch work. For one paragraph in the middle of writing, the built-in pane is faster than any script, because there is nothing to set up.
Written with AI assistance. The steps were tested in Word for the web.
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