Oldham Fire Service Website Translation Guide 2026

Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service has quietly added a short how-to sheet that lets Oldham residents read its safety advice in whatever language they speak. The guide, posted on 23 February, shows the right-click or menu route for turning English pages into more than 100 languages through Chrome, Safari, Edge and Firefox. It is the first time the brigade has packaged browser shortcuts in one place, and it arrives without fanfare or extra budget.

The service admits the computer translations are rough, but says they are good enough to grasp smoke-alarm rules, escape plans and burn-prevention tips. For families whose first language is Urdu, Bengali, Polish or Arabic, that can close the gap between seeing a page and actually understanding it. No staff interpreters are being hired; the work is handed to the same free engines already sitting in most phones and laptops.

Chrome users simply right-click anywhere on a GMFRS page and pick a language. Safari readers head to the View menu, Edge surfers watch for a drop-down in the address bar, and Firefox either pops the choice up automatically or hides it behind three little lines in the corner. Each route takes seconds, and the brigade has linked out to the browser makers' own help pages for anyone who gets stuck.

Council figures show Oldham's schools now teach pupils who speak 42 main languages at home, yet the fire service site has stayed English-only until now. By leaning on tools residents already own, the brigade sidesteps the cost of building a multi-language site while still meeting its legal duty to communicate safely. The trade-off is accuracy: automatic translations can garble technical warnings, so the service urges anyone confused to ring 0800 555 815.

The guide ends with a single phone number and a reminder that a human will still talk callers through anything the robots mangle. For now, the onus is on residents to click translate; the brigade has no plan to auto-detect browser language or flag when text has shifted. Whether the shortcuts reach the people who most need them will depend on word of mouth, classroom notices and surgery waiting-room posters.