10 ms·

Firefox is getting language translation

556 points by jeremiahlee 7y ago

lifthrasiir 7y ago
The project website: https://browser.mt/ https://browser.mt/ According to the Data page [1], it at least makes use of ParaCrawl multilingual corpus [2]. [1] https://browser.mt/data https://browser.mt/data [2] https://paracrawl.eu/releases.html https://paracrawl.eu/releases.html
- Aeolun 7y ago
  To be honest, the website is a bit less than inspiring. Their deliverable for month 3 was the project website.
  - pergadad 7y ago
    Deliverable is funding/contract language. At month 3 any bigger project bringing different partners together is still in a very early coordination stage.
jeremiahlee 7y ago
I wonder if this explains why Mozilla unexpectedly remotely disabled Page Translator add-on yesterday after previously permitting it to be distributed as a side-load for two years. https://github.com/jeremiahlee/page-translator/issues/26 https://github.com/jeremiahlee/page-translator/issues/26
- minitech 7y ago
  Likely? I’m inclined to believe that there’s something wrong with your addon, rather than Firefox being anticompetitive about an extension that doesn’t compete with a feature that doesn’t exist yet.
  - jeremiahlee 7y ago
    When Mozilla rejected it from being distributed on AMO years ago because it included Google and Microsoft translation libraries externally, they said it could be distributed as a side load, just not on AMO. It hasn’t been updated in a year. The policy position changed yesterday.
    - lifthrasiir 7y ago
      Bergamot was there for at least months (for example, the JD for the Bergamot-Mozilla collaboration was posted before this May [1]) and only advertised a few days ago. It is most likely a coincidence, given that Google and Microsoft has full rights to complain to Mozilla. Or, in the reverse direction, they may have complained because of public articles about Bergamot. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20190520103652/https://careers.mozilla.org/listings/ https://web.archive.org/web/20190520103652/https://careers.m...
      - heafield 7y ago
        Hi, I'm the PI of Bergamot. We're funded by this call https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/portal/screen/opportunities/topic-details/ict-29-2018 https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/port... and turned in the proposal on 18 April 2018. The project started 1 January 2019.
- rahidz 7y ago
  I made a post roughly two hours ago on the Firefox Reddit about your add-on getting disabled (a poster there provided me with an excellent workaround), and now come back to HN and this is the top post. I really really hope this is a coincidence vs. Mozilla having some sort of tiff with Google and us being in the crossfire.
- ga-vu 7y ago
  Your extension clearly breaks their rules. Come on now.
amirmasoudabdol 7y ago
While this is great, I like to give a shout out to DeepL Translator [1]. I'm not affiliated with them but I like to recommend them to people who like to step out of Google ecosystem. I am using DeepL for about a year now and I mostly use it for NL<->EN, DE<->EN. So far, I never felt that the translation is off, or terrible, and if not better in some cases, it's as good as Google Translator. [1]: https://www.deepl.com/translator https://www.deepl.com/translator
- enriquto 7y ago
  I find the deepl translations in the available languages very good, much better than google translate. Unfortunately, the selection of languages is (still) very limited.
- baq 7y ago
  i've just tried it out and am positively blown away by the quality of translation.
  - needle0 7y ago
    I'll be blown away when it does near-perfect JP/EN translation (which it doesn't even seem to support). No machine translation has ever been close to being remotely good when it comes to JP/EN, including the ones developed by GAFAM.
- odiroot 7y ago
  I found it to work incredible between Polish and German as well.
- Canova 7y ago
  > Translate from any language only has 9 language options(8 if you exclude the dest language).
- distances 7y ago
  > So far, I never felt that the translation is off, or terrible, and if not better in some cases, it's as good as Google Translator. In my experience Deepl is consistently, without fail, considerably better than Google Translate. I basically use Google now only for more exotic language pairs, or full-page translations.
est31 7y ago
Before you say that Google has world-class ML engineers and Mozilla doesn't even have a chance of competing, consider that the quality of the startup deepl's translator is comparable and possibly even better to the quality of giants like Google or Microsoft. So this seems like one of those problems where small companies can still be competing with GAFAM-scale ones.
- oh_sigh 7y ago
  All the Google ML experts in the world don't matter if Google translate isn't staffed(no idea if it is or it isn't). It's quite possible that deepl has more engineers and ML experts working on the problem than Google does. Google's deep pockets and easily transferrable roster does have the ability to let it play catch-up very quick though, if anyone with influence thinks deepl has gotten too far ahead.
  - est31 7y ago
    > It's quite possible that deepl has more engineers and ML experts working on the problem than Google does. According to this article, they had 22 employees at launch and back then it was already lauded as quite good: https://www.gruenderszene.de/allgemein/deepl-maschineller-uebersetzer-linguee-google-translate https://www.gruenderszene.de/allgemein/deepl-maschineller-ue...
  - reportgunner 7y ago
    It's even possible that the Google ML experts left Google and went to work somewhere else.
- oska 7y ago
  > and possibly even better It is better. Google is now just a sluggish tech bully and only shows world-beating performance through acquisitions (such as, sadly, their acquisition of DeepMind). The Google of 1999 - that a lot of us thrilled to - is long dead.
  - antaviana 7y ago
hans1729 7y ago
Wow, I didn't think that people actually use on-site-translation. I know that translation became a lot better (using deepl [0] personally, check it out if you haven't heard of it!) in recent years, but on-site-translation always seemed quite goofy to me. I wonder if this caters more to a broader (elder) audience, making Firefox more attractive to less tech-affine folks? Seems like a critical feature for "your grantparents computer", doesn't it? [0] https://www.deepl.com/translator https://www.deepl.com/translator
- lifthrasiir 7y ago
  I use on-site machine translation a lot. In fact, I even use that for languages I do understand---at the reduced rate though, alleviating my mental overhead. Of course, you always have to understand that the machine translation can go off and both the common sense and the domain knowledge (including even the tiniest bit of knowledge about the source language) are important.
- reustle 7y ago
  As someone living in Japan without a deep grasp of Kanji characters, I use on-site translations 10s of times per day.
- yoavm 7y ago
  Not heaving in-page translation is the main reason my friends wouldn't switch to Firefox. It's also why I sometimes launch Chrome. Living in a foreign country, you often you have to login and fill in forms in a language you don't know. Being able to translate the whole page in place is extremely useful.
  - heafield 7y ago
    Bergamot has an entire work package devoted to helping you fill out forms in a language you don't speak, while being confident that your answers are correct. We're testing out concepts here: https://github.com/zouharvi/ptakopet https://github.com/zouharvi/ptakopet .
- jplayer01 7y ago
darkwater 7y ago
I think that all the "hidden in the cloud" services like what Google Photos does, translations, well basically every service Google has, must go "edge computing" in the next years. The hardware side is already powerful enough, even in cheap Android smartphones, we just miss a better, dedicated software. Basically an Android phone without many Google Services, although there are some, like Google identity & authentication, which useful and online by their nature and you cannot get rid of them easily. And Google Services come as a pack...
- londons_explore 7y ago
  Google is doing that already. They recently released on-device realtime live video captioning for example. There will always be a performance gap between multi-gigabyte server ML models and client side ones though - and it's up to the users how they prefer the privacy Vs performance tradeoff.
- NilsIRL 7y ago
  Except that would allow people to reverse engineer the code which I think is one the main reasons there is still a lot of services that are in the cloud.
  - darkwater 7y ago
    AFAIK Apple already does lot of local device post processing and nobody broke it
benbristow 7y ago
Nice. Firefox has been missing this for a while, one of the reasons I often end up switching back to Chrome as it does the translation in-place / in the DOM rather than using a Google Translate proxy frame like Firefox addons do.
geraltofrivia 7y ago
I have a habit of recommending FF to my colleagues. We're based in Germany, and many of us are non-natives. On-page translation is the most common reasons they stick to Chrome. I hope when this is included in a stable release, it'll convince some of them to make the shift.
- anxiousguy 7y ago
  We're in the same boat. Luckily, I've found an extension that does a decent job, similar to Chrome's in-page translation. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/translate-whole-page/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/translate-who...
almosaiki 7y ago
30 milion ??
drenvuk 7y ago
I'm having trouble finding which languages this supports. I am mostly in need of eastern Asian languages like Chinese, Korean and Japanese. Will this support them?
- needle0 7y ago
  I second this. Bergamot's website mentions Europe ("...increases the uptake of language technologies in Europe...") but nothing about Asia, which isn't very encouraging.
  - heafield 7y ago
    It's we're funded by the EU and the languages we're contractually obliged to launch are select EU languages. However, if successful, we hope Mozilla and the community will build more languages. We are are that CJKV is an important market.
ga-vu 7y ago
As the article states -- via ZDNet: https://www.zdnet.com/article/firefox-to-get-page-translation-feature-like-chrome/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/firefox-to-get-page-translatio... So maybe link to the actual source instead of the blog spam?
- dang 7y ago
  Changed belatedly now. I didn't see this comment sooner. If you want to be sure we get information, emailing hn@ycombinator.com is the way. (That's in the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.)
fimdomeio 7y ago
When implementing this please take into account that sometimes people are ok with reading content in another language. I don't use chrome that much so maybe it's a configuration thing I never looked into, but the nagging bar asking me if I want to translate every single english page is very annoying. Not a native english speaker but confortable enough to never need the page translated.
- saturn_vk 7y ago
  There's already an "Never for [this site|Language]" option in the translation bar
Autowired 7y ago
Thank you Mozilla! The translation capabilities are the only reason I still have Chrome installed on my phone and laptop. And they are vital to me, since I live in a country whose language I still don't speak.
chrismorgan 7y ago
The demo of https://www.mozilla.org/de/ https://www.mozilla.org/de/ shows what I consider to be a big missed opportunity in the approach: it only suggests a machine translation, and not to switch to the English page, which is probably a better course of action. Specifically, the page is marked up with such tags as these: <link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-GB" href="https://www.mozilla.org/en-GB/" title="English (British)"> I would prefer the browser to first suggest “do you want to switch to the English (British) version of this page?” Sure, I may actually want a machine translation of the text I see on page—the content may be different on the other language’s page; but if the page indicates alternatives are available, I’d prefer to try that first.
- ktpsns 7y ago
  That's so true! Semantic annotations in the HTML header are a missed opportunity for web standards. I'm not meaning Dublin Core (https://www.dublincore.org/ https://www.dublincore.org/ -- declined somehow with SEO engineering), but relational data: <link rel='prev' href='..." title="Previous page (about X)"> <link rel='next' href='...' title='Next page (about Y)' /> <link rel="copyright" href="..." title="Our imprint and contact infrormation"> <link rel="search" type="application/opensearchdescription+xml" href="..." title="Our Website title"> <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" href="..." title="News from our website" /> <link rel="alternate" href="..." hreflang="de" title="German translation of XYZ"> From these six examples, modern desktop Firefox/chrome only displays adding the search engine (when clicking in the search/omni box). RSS died a long death (the availability was removed in Firefox a few months ago). And all other information was only ever displayed by the good old Opera browser, who had a special symbol bar for relational data and even overloaded the prev/next browser navigation buttons with prev/next header suggestions from the page.
z3t4 7y ago
Some years ago when Google translate was released I made a large web app compatible so I didn't have to translate everything manually. Then Google crippled it. One of the cool feature was that you could chat with other users and it would be translated in real time. I'm now planning to add translations to another app, but if it could be done Automatically in Firefox, like with Google translate when it first came out, that would be so awesome. Would save me a lot of work.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
ktpsns 7y ago
It should be noted that this project is funded by the European union. You can find all funding details, reports and publications at https://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/219608/factsheet/en https://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/219608/factsheet/en (the project started in January 2019, so there are not much reports yet). It is amazing that they work so closely together with Firefox, so the project result will be really of a use for not only European citizens but people on all the world.
als0 7y ago
This is great. I hate relying on the translation services of Microsoft and Google, but I’ve been using them since they’re typically more convenient to use than separate applications.
SimeVidas 7y ago
Article from yesterday… Image with Firefox logo already outdated xD
pier25 7y ago
Is there a way to vote for new Firefox features? I switched to Firefox a couple of weeks ago and ML translations would be very low in my list of priorities.
- jeffdavis 7y ago
  What is high on your list?
wojciechpolak 7y ago
I'd like to see a similar effort, but to replace Grammarly (i.e. make it private, secure, and offline)
- heafield 7y ago
  Actually, the winner of the shared task on grammatical error correction https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/nl/bea2019st/ https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/nl/bea2019st/ is https://neural.mt/papers/edinburgh/bea19.pdf https://neural.mt/papers/edinburgh/bea19.pdf which uses the same machine translation codebase, Marian, as the Bergamot does.
godshatter 7y ago
I'm glad this isn't cloud-based. I keep logged out of google as a rule, and at least the last time I checked you had to be logged in to use Google Translate.
quantumfoam 7y ago
FWIW, DeepL has restrictions on IP depending on how often you translate things. I've had to connect to various VPNs to continue a conversation without having to login. It is a good translation tool (and I've used several, Google, Bing) and sure, it's accurate and all but DeepL doesn't compare when it comes to conversational translation or, voice to text etc. If it's simple copy and pasting it does that sufficiently well.
timonoko 7y ago
Sorry Mozilla. You cannot beat this: https://photos.app.goo.gl/Tob6ZnDKti621gX27 https://photos.app.goo.gl/Tob6ZnDKti621gX27 Google Meta-translator finds the meaning not the words.

556 points by jeremiahlee 7y ago

The project website: https://browser.mt/ https://browser.mt/ According to the Data page [1], it at least makes use of ParaCrawl multilingual corpus [2]. [1] https://browser.mt/data https://browser.mt/data [2] https://paracrawl.eu/releases.html https://paracrawl.eu/releases.html

Aeolun 7y ago
To be honest, the website is a bit less than inspiring. Their deliverable for month 3 was the project website.
- pergadad 7y ago
  Deliverable is funding/contract language. At month 3 any bigger project bringing different partners together is still in a very early coordination stage.

jeremiahlee 7y ago

I wonder if this explains why Mozilla unexpectedly remotely disabled Page Translator add-on yesterday after previously permitting it to be distributed as a side-load for two years. https://github.com/jeremiahlee/page-translator/issues/26 https://github.com/jeremiahlee/page-translator/issues/26

minitech 7y ago
Likely? I’m inclined to believe that there’s something wrong with your addon, rather than Firefox being anticompetitive about an extension that doesn’t compete with a feature that doesn’t exist yet.
- jeremiahlee 7y ago
  When Mozilla rejected it from being distributed on AMO years ago because it included Google and Microsoft translation libraries externally, they said it could be distributed as a side load, just not on AMO. It hasn’t been updated in a year. The policy position changed yesterday.
  - lifthrasiir 7y ago
    Bergamot was there for at least months (for example, the JD for the Bergamot-Mozilla collaboration was posted before this May [1]) and only advertised a few days ago. It is most likely a coincidence, given that Google and Microsoft has full rights to complain to Mozilla. Or, in the reverse direction, they may have complained because of public articles about Bergamot. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20190520103652/https://careers.mozilla.org/listings/ https://web.archive.org/web/20190520103652/https://careers.m...
    - heafield 7y ago
      Hi, I'm the PI of Bergamot. We're funded by this call https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/portal/screen/opportunities/topic-details/ict-29-2018 https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/port... and turned in the proposal on 18 April 2018. The project started 1 January 2019.
rahidz 7y ago
I made a post roughly two hours ago on the Firefox Reddit about your add-on getting disabled (a poster there provided me with an excellent workaround), and now come back to HN and this is the top post. I really really hope this is a coincidence vs. Mozilla having some sort of tiff with Google and us being in the crossfire.
ga-vu 7y ago
Your extension clearly breaks their rules. Come on now.

amirmasoudabdol 7y ago

While this is great, I like to give a shout out to DeepL Translator [1]. I'm not affiliated with them but I like to recommend them to people who like to step out of Google ecosystem. I am using DeepL for about a year now and I mostly use it for NL<->EN, DE<->EN. So far, I never felt that the translation is off, or terrible, and if not better in some cases, it's as good as Google Translator. [1]: https://www.deepl.com/translator https://www.deepl.com/translator

enriquto 7y ago
I find the deepl translations in the available languages very good, much better than google translate. Unfortunately, the selection of languages is (still) very limited.
baq 7y ago
i've just tried it out and am positively blown away by the quality of translation.
- needle0 7y ago
  I'll be blown away when it does near-perfect JP/EN translation (which it doesn't even seem to support). No machine translation has ever been close to being remotely good when it comes to JP/EN, including the ones developed by GAFAM.
odiroot 7y ago
I found it to work incredible between Polish and German as well.
Canova 7y ago
> Translate from any language only has 9 language options(8 if you exclude the dest language).
distances 7y ago
> So far, I never felt that the translation is off, or terrible, and if not better in some cases, it's as good as Google Translator. In my experience Deepl is consistently, without fail, considerably better than Google Translate. I basically use Google now only for more exotic language pairs, or full-page translations.

est31 7y ago

Before you say that Google has world-class ML engineers and Mozilla doesn't even have a chance of competing, consider that the quality of the startup deepl's translator is comparable and possibly even better to the quality of giants like Google or Microsoft. So this seems like one of those problems where small companies can still be competing with GAFAM-scale ones.

oh_sigh 7y ago
All the Google ML experts in the world don't matter if Google translate isn't staffed(no idea if it is or it isn't). It's quite possible that deepl has more engineers and ML experts working on the problem than Google does. Google's deep pockets and easily transferrable roster does have the ability to let it play catch-up very quick though, if anyone with influence thinks deepl has gotten too far ahead.
- est31 7y ago
  > It's quite possible that deepl has more engineers and ML experts working on the problem than Google does. According to this article, they had 22 employees at launch and back then it was already lauded as quite good: https://www.gruenderszene.de/allgemein/deepl-maschineller-uebersetzer-linguee-google-translate https://www.gruenderszene.de/allgemein/deepl-maschineller-ue...
- reportgunner 7y ago
  It's even possible that the Google ML experts left Google and went to work somewhere else.
oska 7y ago
> and possibly even better It is better. Google is now just a sluggish tech bully and only shows world-beating performance through acquisitions (such as, sadly, their acquisition of DeepMind). The Google of 1999 - that a lot of us thrilled to - is long dead.
- antaviana 7y ago

hans1729 7y ago

Wow, I didn't think that people actually use on-site-translation. I know that translation became a lot better (using deepl [0] personally, check it out if you haven't heard of it!) in recent years, but on-site-translation always seemed quite goofy to me. I wonder if this caters more to a broader (elder) audience, making Firefox more attractive to less tech-affine folks? Seems like a critical feature for "your grantparents computer", doesn't it? [0] https://www.deepl.com/translator https://www.deepl.com/translator

lifthrasiir 7y ago
I use on-site machine translation a lot. In fact, I even use that for languages I do understand---at the reduced rate though, alleviating my mental overhead. Of course, you always have to understand that the machine translation can go off and both the common sense and the domain knowledge (including even the tiniest bit of knowledge about the source language) are important.
reustle 7y ago
As someone living in Japan without a deep grasp of Kanji characters, I use on-site translations 10s of times per day.
yoavm 7y ago
Not heaving in-page translation is the main reason my friends wouldn't switch to Firefox. It's also why I sometimes launch Chrome. Living in a foreign country, you often you have to login and fill in forms in a language you don't know. Being able to translate the whole page in place is extremely useful.
- heafield 7y ago
  Bergamot has an entire work package devoted to helping you fill out forms in a language you don't speak, while being confident that your answers are correct. We're testing out concepts here: https://github.com/zouharvi/ptakopet https://github.com/zouharvi/ptakopet .
jplayer01 7y ago

darkwater 7y ago

I think that all the "hidden in the cloud" services like what Google Photos does, translations, well basically every service Google has, must go "edge computing" in the next years. The hardware side is already powerful enough, even in cheap Android smartphones, we just miss a better, dedicated software. Basically an Android phone without many Google Services, although there are some, like Google identity & authentication, which useful and online by their nature and you cannot get rid of them easily. And Google Services come as a pack...

londons_explore 7y ago
Google is doing that already. They recently released on-device realtime live video captioning for example. There will always be a performance gap between multi-gigabyte server ML models and client side ones though - and it's up to the users how they prefer the privacy Vs performance tradeoff.
NilsIRL 7y ago
Except that would allow people to reverse engineer the code which I think is one the main reasons there is still a lot of services that are in the cloud.
- darkwater 7y ago
  AFAIK Apple already does lot of local device post processing and nobody broke it

benbristow 7y ago

Nice. Firefox has been missing this for a while, one of the reasons I often end up switching back to Chrome as it does the translation in-place / in the DOM rather than using a Google Translate proxy frame like Firefox addons do.

geraltofrivia 7y ago

I have a habit of recommending FF to my colleagues. We're based in Germany, and many of us are non-natives. On-page translation is the most common reasons they stick to Chrome. I hope when this is included in a stable release, it'll convince some of them to make the shift.

anxiousguy 7y ago
We're in the same boat. Luckily, I've found an extension that does a decent job, similar to Chrome's in-page translation. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/translate-whole-page/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/translate-who...

almosaiki 7y ago

30 milion ??

drenvuk 7y ago

I'm having trouble finding which languages this supports. I am mostly in need of eastern Asian languages like Chinese, Korean and Japanese. Will this support them?

needle0 7y ago
I second this. Bergamot's website mentions Europe ("...increases the uptake of language technologies in Europe...") but nothing about Asia, which isn't very encouraging.
- heafield 7y ago
  It's we're funded by the EU and the languages we're contractually obliged to launch are select EU languages. However, if successful, we hope Mozilla and the community will build more languages. We are are that CJKV is an important market.

ga-vu 7y ago

As the article states -- via ZDNet: https://www.zdnet.com/article/firefox-to-get-page-translation-feature-like-chrome/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/firefox-to-get-page-translatio... So maybe link to the actual source instead of the blog spam?

dang 7y ago
Changed belatedly now. I didn't see this comment sooner. If you want to be sure we get information, emailing hn@ycombinator.com is the way. (That's in the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.)

fimdomeio 7y ago

When implementing this please take into account that sometimes people are ok with reading content in another language. I don't use chrome that much so maybe it's a configuration thing I never looked into, but the nagging bar asking me if I want to translate every single english page is very annoying. Not a native english speaker but confortable enough to never need the page translated.

saturn_vk 7y ago
There's already an "Never for [this site|Language]" option in the translation bar

Autowired 7y ago

Thank you Mozilla! The translation capabilities are the only reason I still have Chrome installed on my phone and laptop. And they are vital to me, since I live in a country whose language I still don't speak.

chrismorgan 7y ago

The demo of https://www.mozilla.org/de/ https://www.mozilla.org/de/ shows what I consider to be a big missed opportunity in the approach: it only suggests a machine translation, and not to switch to the English page, which is probably a better course of action. Specifically, the page is marked up with such tags as these: <link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-GB" href="https://www.mozilla.org/en-GB/" title="English (British)"> I would prefer the browser to first suggest “do you want to switch to the English (British) version of this page?” Sure, I may actually want a machine translation of the text I see on page—the content may be different on the other language’s page; but if the page indicates alternatives are available, I’d prefer to try that first.

ktpsns 7y ago
That's so true! Semantic annotations in the HTML header are a missed opportunity for web standards. I'm not meaning Dublin Core (https://www.dublincore.org/ https://www.dublincore.org/ -- declined somehow with SEO engineering), but relational data: <link rel='prev' href='..." title="Previous page (about X)"> <link rel='next' href='...' title='Next page (about Y)' /> <link rel="copyright" href="..." title="Our imprint and contact infrormation"> <link rel="search" type="application/opensearchdescription+xml" href="..." title="Our Website title"> <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" href="..." title="News from our website" /> <link rel="alternate" href="..." hreflang="de" title="German translation of XYZ"> From these six examples, modern desktop Firefox/chrome only displays adding the search engine (when clicking in the search/omni box). RSS died a long death (the availability was removed in Firefox a few months ago). And all other information was only ever displayed by the good old Opera browser, who had a special symbol bar for relational data and even overloaded the prev/next browser navigation buttons with prev/next header suggestions from the page.

z3t4 7y ago

Some years ago when Google translate was released I made a large web app compatible so I didn't have to translate everything manually. Then Google crippled it. One of the cool feature was that you could chat with other users and it would be translated in real time. I'm now planning to add translations to another app, but if it could be done Automatically in Firefox, like with Google translate when it first came out, that would be so awesome. Would save me a lot of work.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

ktpsns 7y ago

It should be noted that this project is funded by the European union. You can find all funding details, reports and publications at https://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/219608/factsheet/en https://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/219608/factsheet/en (the project started in January 2019, so there are not much reports yet). It is amazing that they work so closely together with Firefox, so the project result will be really of a use for not only European citizens but people on all the world.

als0 7y ago

This is great. I hate relying on the translation services of Microsoft and Google, but I’ve been using them since they’re typically more convenient to use than separate applications.

SimeVidas 7y ago

Article from yesterday… Image with Firefox logo already outdated xD

pier25 7y ago

Is there a way to vote for new Firefox features? I switched to Firefox a couple of weeks ago and ML translations would be very low in my list of priorities.

jeffdavis 7y ago
What is high on your list?

wojciechpolak 7y ago

I'd like to see a similar effort, but to replace Grammarly (i.e. make it private, secure, and offline)

heafield 7y ago
Actually, the winner of the shared task on grammatical error correction https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/nl/bea2019st/ https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/nl/bea2019st/ is https://neural.mt/papers/edinburgh/bea19.pdf https://neural.mt/papers/edinburgh/bea19.pdf which uses the same machine translation codebase, Marian, as the Bergamot does.

godshatter 7y ago

I'm glad this isn't cloud-based. I keep logged out of google as a rule, and at least the last time I checked you had to be logged in to use Google Translate.

quantumfoam 7y ago

FWIW, DeepL has restrictions on IP depending on how often you translate things. I've had to connect to various VPNs to continue a conversation without having to login. It is a good translation tool (and I've used several, Google, Bing) and sure, it's accurate and all but DeepL doesn't compare when it comes to conversational translation or, voice to text etc. If it's simple copy and pasting it does that sufficiently well.

timonoko 7y ago

Sorry Mozilla. You cannot beat this: https://photos.app.goo.gl/Tob6ZnDKti621gX27 https://photos.app.goo.gl/Tob6ZnDKti621gX27 Google Meta-translator finds the meaning not the words.