I am an open source nerd, and when I saw Glate described as a way to translate text natively on Linux, I had to test it myself. I installed Glate 4.2.0 from the Snap Store on my machine, launched it, typed a German sentence into it, and watched it come back in English. So I decided to write down where it excels, where it fails, and whether you should install it.
Glate is a free, open source desktop app that wraps Google Translate (and Bing as a second engine) in a native toolbox-style window. It translates between more than 100 languages, keeps a translation history you can export, and does text-to-speech out of the box. The developer publishes it on GitHub under the MIT license, and the current stable release is 4.2.0, published on the Snap Store on 30 June 2026.
What Glate can do
- Wide language support: translation between over 100 languages, with automatic source-language detection. I typed German and it detected it without me touching the dropdown.
- Translation history: every sentence you translate is kept in a history pane you can re-open and export as a .txt file. This was the one feature the 2024 screenshots below already covered, and it still works the same way.
- Text-to-speech: Glate can read the translated text aloud or save it as an MP3, which I used to check my German pronunciation was as bad as I suspected.
- Two engines: Google Translate by default, Bing as a fallback, so you are not locked into one service.
Installing Glate on Linux
The easiest route is the Snap Store. I ran this on Ubuntu and the app was running within a minute:
sudo snap install glate
If you prefer Flatpak, the app is also published on Flathub as com.ktechpit.glate, also at version 4.2. On Arch, the AUR carries an older 4.1.0 package, so I would use the Snap or Flatpak build to stay current. The source code lives in the official GitHub repository if you would rather build it yourself.
Using Glate: my first translation
I launched it on my desktop and got a tidy two-column window: source text on the left, translation on the right, language pickers on top. I typed Wo ist der nächste Bahnhof?, set the target to English, and hit translate. Out came Where is the nearest train station? instantly. No browser, no tab juggling.
The hotkey catch
Here is the one thing that will bite you. Glate’s global hotkeys, the ones that let you translate selected text from anywhere with a keystroke, only work on X11 and XWayland sessions. I run a Wayland desktop, and the hotkeys simply did not respond until I tested on an X11 session, where they worked fine. The main window works everywhere, so this is a limitation of the shortcut layer, not the app itself.
Where Glate fits in my setup
After my test, Glate earned a permanent spot in my dock. It is faster than opening a browser tab, the history means I never lose a translation, and the MP3 export is a neat trick for language learning. If you want alternatives for reading text aloud beyond translation, I tried other Linux apps with TTS in the Koodo ebook reader article, and for more desktop utilities the AppImage apps guide covers another way to install tools like this one.
My verdict: install it. One snap command, no configuration, works exactly as promised on X11, and the hotkey limitation on Wayland is a single honest caveat in an otherwise excellent little tool.