Google Translation Hub gave departments a self-service portal for translating documents with AI. Google deprecated it on June 30, 2025, and the platform shut down on September 20, 2026. Google's own advice is to migrate to Cloud Translation, its developer API, which leaves teams without a ready-made portal unless someone builds one.
If your team used Translation Hub to translate documents with consistent terminology, Lexibird covers that job without a cloud project: document translation that keeps the layout, shared glossaries, and a choice of leading AI models. It also handles the text, screenshots, and recordings that never arrive as files.
At a glance
| Lexibird | Google Translation Hub | |
|---|---|---|
| Status | Actively developed | Shut down on September 20, 2026 |
| What it is | AI translator app for individuals and teams | Document translation service in Google Cloud |
| Content you can translate | Text, documents, images, screenshots, audio | Documents |
| Languages | 200+ for text translation | 135 for documents |
| AI models | Claude, GPT, or Gemini families, or Auto | Google's translation models and custom-trained models |
| Getting started | Create a workspace and invite your team | Required a Google Cloud project, service setup, and portals |
| Where you use it | Web, macOS and Windows apps, browser extension | A browser-based portal |
| Glossaries | Shared across the workspace, import CSV, TSV, or TMX | Glossaries managed per portal |
| Privacy controls | Single sign-on and zero data retention on Business | Access controls through Google Cloud |
What is Lexibird?
Lexibird (formerly Translatium) is where a former Translation Hub portal can land without an IT ticket: an admin creates a workspace, uploads the department's glossary, and invites colleagues the same afternoon. Beyond the documents your portal handled, it translates text in more than 200 languages, plus screenshots and recordings.
What was Google Translation Hub?
Google Translation Hub was a managed document translation service from Google Cloud. It translated documents into 135 languages while retaining formatting, and administrators set up department portals with access controls, glossaries, and custom models. Its Advanced tier added translation memory, post-editing, human review, and machine translation quality prediction.
1. Translation that goes beyond documents
Translation Hub was built around uploading formatted files. That works for reports and presentations, but a lot of a team's multilingual work never arrives as a file. A support agent gets a screenshot of an error in Korean, or a researcher has a recorded interview in Portuguese.
In Lexibird, all of these happen in the same place. Images and screenshots go through OCR and then translation, recordings are transcribed, and short messages keep their tone. When a real file does come in, document translation takes the Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and PDF files your portal used to process, up to 40 MB each, keeps the layout, and deletes them after 24 hours.
2. A replacement without a cloud project
Google points Translation Hub customers to Cloud Translation, an API that developers build into their own tools. That means building and maintaining the portal your colleagues used to open.
Lexibird works like any other business app: no project to provision and no portal to build. Admins and members sign in to the web app, the desktop app, or the browser extension and start translating.
3. Choose a model instead of training one
Translation Hub let organizations with large bilingual datasets train custom models for their domain.
Lexibird takes a shorter path. You pick from leading AI models in the Claude, GPT, and Gemini families, or let Auto choose. These models read context, so "we're going to have to pass on this one" in a client email becomes a polite decline in French rather than a literal remark about passing something. You can set a formal or informal tone, and switch models if a sentence doesn't land the way you want.
4. Glossaries and privacy for the whole team
The glossaries you maintained per portal can move into a single workspace. Lexibird's glossaries take a spreadsheet or TMX export, and once imported, every colleague's text translations follow the same terms. Lexibird doesn't offer translation memory, which Translation Hub Advanced did, so teams that reuse approved segments at scale should factor that in.
Translation Hub kept access inside your Google Cloud project. On Lexibird's Business plan, single sign-on with SAML or OIDC covers access, and zero data retention is on by default: Lexibird sends text only to AI providers that don't store it, and if none can take the request, you get an error, never a silent detour to a provider that keeps data.
5. Translation where you already work
Translation Hub meant opening a portal and uploading a file, even for one paragraph. With Lexibird, a colleague reading a supplier's Spanish terms on the web can highlight the clause and press Ctrl+Shift+E (Cmd+Shift+E on Mac) in the browser extension to read it in English. The macOS and Windows apps stay a shortcut away for anything outside the browser, including text in a screenshot you can't copy.
Which one should you choose?
Since Translation Hub is gone, the real question is what to use instead. If your engineers want to build a custom localization pipeline on Google Cloud, Cloud Translation is the path Google recommends.
For everyone who used the portal to get their work translated, choose Lexibird if:
- You need a replacement your departments can use this week, not after a Cloud Translation build
- Your glossaries should carry over instead of being rebuilt
- You'd rather pick a model per task than train and maintain a custom one
- Your team also needs to translate emails, screenshots, and recordings, not just files
Moving takes a few minutes: bring your term lists over, invite your team, and start translating with Lexibird.
