In a blog post, the Mozilla team announced that the local machine translation tool is now available for testing in the Firefox web browser.
Firefox Add-on for Local Web Page Translation
Initiative
The offline translation is part of the Project Bergamot, a collaboration between Mozilla, the University of Edinburgh, Charles University, the University of Sheffield and the University of Tartu. The European Union funds this project.
The primary objective of this project is to develop a set of language translation tools based on neural networks and machine learning.
They include developing a new translation engine, language models and in-page translation, which runs locally on the user’s computer.
Privacy and Inner workings
In addition, this is a significant project because none of the source data is transmitted to the cloud or any server, protecting your data and privacy.
Under the hood, a high-level API ported to WebAssembly runs around the machine translation engine to give offline page translation features.
Moreover, a test page is available here to check how offline translation works via this development.
How to try Firefox Translation
The add-on is still under development and available as a Firefox Add-on for all variants (Nightly, Beta and stable releases).
- Firstly, Go to the Firefox Translation Addon page
- Secondly, Click on Add to Firefox
- Finally, Click Add
You should see a small icon at the end of the address bar as shown. Click on this tool, and a new language toolbar is shown below (Figure 1).
Now, the tool should auto-detect the language of the page, and you can click Translate to start the translation.
As of writing this, the add-on supports the following languages.
- Bulgarian
- Czech
- Estonian
- German
- Icelandic
- Italian
- Norwegian Bokmål
- Norwegian Nynorsk
- Persian
- Portuguese
- Russian
- Spanish
How can you help?
Mozilla needs your help to improve this tool further as it is for the community. Here is the list of channels how you can make a difference in this project for the benefit of others.
- Feedback and issues report via GitHub
- Survey to provide your feedback after using the add-on
- Language training model for tech users
Via Mozilla blog
