Does Readlang work offline? No, and here is what you can do about it

Is Readlang down right now?

A blank reader, a spinner that never finishes, a word that does nothing when you click it. Any of these can be Readlang having a bad hour, and any of them can be your browser, your extension or your connection. We do not monitor Readlang uptime and are not going to guess at its history. What we can give you is the order to check things in, from cheapest to slowest.

1. Look at the forum first. Open forum.readlang.com. When the site is down for everyone, a thread appears within minutes and the founder replies in it. If the forum loads and nobody is complaining, the problem is more likely on your side, and the next four steps are worth doing before you post.
2. Load readlang.com in a private window. This rules out a stale login and a cached page that is stuck. If it loads and signs you in, go back to your usual browser, sign out, sign in again, and reload the text.
3. Try a second browser. If readlang.com works in Firefox but the Web Reader extension in Chrome does nothing, the extension is the problem, not the service. Extensions break on updates and on site permission changes far more often than websites go down.
4. On Safari, check third-party cookies. There is no Safari extension; the bookmarklet needs third-party cookies allowed. With them blocked, the bookmarklet can look like a sign-in that fails silently. That is a setting, not an outage.
5. On a Kindle, stop expecting it to work. Readlang never supported the Kindle browser officially. People used it anyway, and in March 2026 a forum thread titled "Readlang not working on Kindle anymore?" reported that the site no longer loads there. Not an outage, and not something a reload will fix.

If you got through the list, it is still blank in every browser, and the forum is quiet, post there with your browser, your device and what you see on the screen. That is the entire support channel, and in our experience it works better than most.

What actually works without a connection

Almost nothing, in the sense that matters. A text you already had open may keep displaying after the connection drops, because the page is already in your browser. The moment you click a word, though, the translation has to come from the server, and it will not arrive. Flashcards need the network to fetch the next card and to record your answer. The Web Reader extension injects itself into a page you are already looking at, so the page may still be there, but the translations need the network just the same.

Behaviour of the web app as checked on 14 September 2026. How long a cached page survives varies between browsers; do not rely on it.

The home-screen shortcut on an iPhone follows the same rules, because it is the same website in a full-screen browser window. The iPhone page goes through what that setup gives you day to day.

Workarounds that are worth the effort

Since there is no offline switch, the useful question is what you can prepare while you still have a connection. Three things carry over; one common hope does not.

Before a trip, export your vocabulary

Everything you have clicked lives in the Readlang vocabulary manager, and the manager exports to a CSV file with the word, its translation and the sentence it came from. Anki reviews that file offline; so does any spreadsheet. It is the one part of Readlang that turns into something you can use with the network off, and the Anki export page walks through the steps and the limits.

Pre-read the hard parts while online

If you know a long flight is coming, read the chapter at home first with Readlang, click every word you do not know, and use the AI explanations on the sentences that resist you. The free plan allows ten explanations a day; Premium removes the limit. Then reread the same chapter offline in the original file. The words you clicked are the ones you will recognise, and a second pass through a text you have already decoded is a good use of a train.

Use reader mode for the text itself

When the goal is simply to keep reading, open the source in something that does not need a server: the reader mode of your browser on a page you had loaded, or the EPUB you uploaded, in the built-in books app on your phone. Keep a dictionary app for the odd word. It is slower than click-to-translate, and it works in a tunnel.

What does not work: downloading texts for later

There is no download button for texts in Readlang and no way to save a book for offline reading inside it. Keep the file you uploaded; the copy in Readlang is not one you can take with you. The Readlang tutorial has more on how uploads and the library fit together.

Readlang Mobile: the one exception on iPhone, with a caveat

Full disclosure first: we make Readlang Mobile, a native iOS app for iPhone and iPad on iOS 18 and later. It is an independent product and has no connection to Readlang or its developer. The comparison page puts the two side by side; this section is only about the offline question.

By default, Readlang Mobile uses a server too. When you tap a word, or tap the first and last word of a phrase, the translation comes from Google Translate through the app's server; in Settings you can switch to Apple Translate, which runs on the device. If the chosen engine is unavailable, the app tries the other one, so without a connection it switches to Apple Translate. That is how the thing Readlang cannot do, translating with the network off, becomes possible here.

Two conditions apply, and they are worth knowing before you board.

• Open the book once while online. The app fetches a library book or processes your EPUB the first time you open it. After that it is on the device.
• Download the language pack first. Offline, Apple Translate needs the pack for your pair on the device; the app points you to iOS Settings to download it. Do it on Wi-Fi at home, not at the gate.

The caveat is languages. Apple Translation on the device covers about twenty: English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Turkish, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and a few more. Readlang supports more than a hundred. If the language you are learning is outside that list, Readlang remains the answer, offline or not, and this page has nothing better to offer you for it. Readlang Mobile also has no web extension and no YouTube; articles by link need a connection to fetch, then read like a book.

The free plan gives 30 translations a day, phrases up to six words, and the whole library of public-domain books sorted by level. Premium is $8.99 a month or $59.99 a year, with the first year at $29.99 as of September 2026; it removes the daily limit, allows longer phrases and your own EPUBs, and adds practice on the words you saved. Subscription through the App Store, cancelled in iOS settings.

Questions people ask