Follow Portuguese meetings, webinars, and live video in real-time English captions—no recording, no bots, no guesswork.
Portuguese from São Paulo runs at roughly 320 syllables per minute, slower than European Portuguese from Lisbon but still quick enough to bury subject pronouns, leave verb agreement implicit, and rely on inflected infinitives that English has no parallel for. When you're sitting in on a product demo from a Brazilian SaaS company, joining a compliance training call with the Lisbon office, or watching a live construction safety briefing from a contractor in Belo Horizonte, you need captions that reconstruct dropped subjects, resolve mesoclitic pronouns wedged inside future-tense verbs, and render meaning before the next subordinate clause arrives.
Translext captures the audio playing in your Chrome tab, transcribes the Portuguese in real time, and displays English captions with optional speech output. Everything runs in the tab. No meeting bot appears on the participant list, no audio uploads to a server, and no transcript survives after you close the session. You get immediate comprehension of spoken Portuguese without the friction of recording tools or the privacy cost of cloud storage.
Portuguese allows—and strongly prefers—dropping subject pronouns when verb conjugation makes the referent clear. A speaker says *Falamos* (we speak), *Vão mandar* (they will send), or *Preciso revisar* (I need to review) with no explicit subject, and listeners infer person and number from the verb ending alone. European Portuguese drops subjects even more aggressively than Brazilian registers. English requires explicit subjects in nearly every finite clause, so live translation must track prior context to insert the correct pronoun: *we speak*, *they will send*, *I need to review*. When a Portuguese speaker chains several verbs across a long turn—common in technical explanations from engineers in Porto or financial analysts in São Paulo—the system reconstructs who is doing what by holding verb forms in memory and matching them to the last named actor. Errors happen when speakers switch referents without signaling, but the captions usually recover within a clause or two.
European Portuguese inserts clitic pronouns into the middle of future and conditional verb forms: *fá-lo-ei* (I will do it), *dar-lhe-emos* (we will give to him/her), *enviá-la-ia* (I would send it). The pronoun splits the infinitive from its future auxiliary, a structure English abandoned centuries ago and that modern live translation models rarely see in training data. Brazilian Portuguese avoids mesoclisis almost entirely, preferring proclitic placement or analytic futures with *ir* + infinitive, so a Lisbon-based project manager and a Rio stakeholder may use different syntax in the same meeting. Translext transcribes the Portuguese accurately, but rendering mesoclitic constructions into natural English sometimes requires waiting for the entire verb cluster to finish. Captions may trail by a half-second on these forms. If you work regularly with teams in Portugal—common in renewable energy partnerships, cork and wine export, or IT outsourcing—you'll see mesoclisis often enough that the delay becomes predictable.
Brazilian Portuguese distinguishes open and closed mid vowels in stressed syllables: *avó* (grandmother) versus *avô* (grandfather), *pode* (can, present) versus *pôde* (could, preterite). Minimal pairs like *cor* (color) and *corr* (run, subjunctive stem) hinge on vowel quality alone. Transcription models trained heavily on European Portuguese, where vowel reduction in unstressed syllables is extreme and schwa dominates, sometimes misrecognize Brazilian open vowels or assign the wrong lexical item. This matters in industries where Portuguese and English teams overlap most: oil and gas calls with Petrobras suppliers in Rio, agribusiness updates from Mato Grosso soy exporters, and customer support sessions from software companies in Florianópolis or Recife. Translext uses recent multilingual speech models that handle both European and Brazilian phonology, but you'll still catch occasional errors when a speaker from Portugal and a speaker from Brazil use the same lexical item with different vowel targets. The English captions usually self-correct when surrounding words provide context.
The transcription model recognizes both. European Portuguese reduces unstressed vowels heavily and uses mesoclitic pronouns; Brazilian Portuguese keeps vowels more open and prefers analytic verb forms. You'll get accurate transcriptions from Lisbon, Porto, São Paulo, and Rio without changing settings. Occasional errors happen on minimal pairs that depend on vowel quality or when a speaker mixes registers, but the English captions usually resolve ambiguity from context. If your meetings regularly include both European and Brazilian participants—common in multinational manufacturing, finance, or consulting—the system handles code-switching between the two norms.
Yes, as long as the audio plays in a Chrome tab. Translext captures tab audio, so it works on YouTube videos, live streams, Google Meet calls, and any web-based platform that runs in Chrome. It does not work on the Zoom desktop app, Microsoft Teams desktop app, or anything outside the browser. If you join a Zoom meeting using the web client in Chrome, it will work. No meeting bot joins the call and no participant sees anything on their end.
Portuguese borrows heavily from English in tech, business, and advertising, often adapting pronunciation: *software* becomes something close to /ˈsɔf(t)wɛɾ/, *marketing* shifts stress to the first syllable. The transcription usually captures these terms correctly because they appear frequently in training data. The English captions pass them through unchanged—*software*, *deadline*, *backup*—since translating them back into English would be redundant. Occasionally the system mishears an adapted loanword as a Portuguese term, especially if the speaker nasalizes vowels or uses a strong Brazilian rhotic, but surrounding context almost always makes the intent clear.
Portuguese speech rate varies—European Portuguese runs faster than most Brazilian registers—but Translext generally keeps captions within one to two seconds of live audio. The system transcribes and translates in parallel, so you see partial captions as the speaker continues. When two people overlap, transcription accuracy drops because the model can't reliably separate voices; you'll see garbled captions until one speaker finishes. There's no speaker diarization, so the captions don't label who said what. If you need to catch every word in a overlapping discussion, ask participants to mute when not speaking.
Chrome only. No Firefox, Safari, Edge, or mobile builds exist today. The extension requires an internet connection because transcription and translation models run remotely; there's no offline mode. Audio never leaves your machine as a recording—it's processed in real time and discarded—but the connection must stay live for the session to work.
Live captions and translated audio for anything playing in your browser tab. No bots to invite, nothing to upload.