9 ms·

This is the version with local translation of web pages. It looks like they translate between Bulgarian, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portu

This is the version with local translation of web pages. It looks like they translate between Bulgarian, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, and Spanish. I tried a French language page, and the translation to English seemed excellent. It was fun to watch the text change on the page as it was translated.

darkclouds 3y ago
[flagged]
- tmpX7dMeXU 3y ago
  Are you implying that your stock Edge is feeding you altered text? If so, you should speak to a professional, and I don’t mean a computer professional. EDIT: someone who isn’t me should probably report the literal death threats in your bio.
  - darkclouds 3y ago
    [dead]
    - dang 3y ago
      I'm sorry, but we have to ban this account, as posts like this are simply not what the site is for: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. (I mean no disrespect toward the experiences you're articulating, which have obviously been deep and impactful.)
  - dang 3y ago
    Please don't cross into personal attack. It only makes everything worse. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
dewey 3y ago
Finally, that extension for Google Translate was really clunky and it was weird that this is coming so late while Chrome had a polished integration for such a long time already.
- xnorswap 3y ago
  Not wanting to run it via a cloud service was probably a big factor, assuming google translate goes via the cloud. Google has no qualms about sucking up all your data.
  - jqpabc123 3y ago
    Google has no qualms about sucking up all your data. Google also has no qualms about you using Firefox. They pay Mozilla $450 mil a year to insure it stays this way.
    - syncbehind 3y ago
      Google absolutely has qualm about you using Firefox. Yes, they pay Moz money to keep them as the preferred search, but that's because it's the better of two options (no data at all from you, or at least your search data). But if you need evidence that Google has qualms about you using other browsers, look at how poorly supported other browsers are for google services.
    - JohnBooty 3y ago
      I don't claim to read minds or have inside information, but there's no doubt in my mind that this is largely a $450mil annual hedge against getting antitrust'd by the DOJ.
      - jqpabc123 3y ago
        Sorry, that argument no longer flies. Goggle payments have done nothing but go up as FireFox market share has done nothing but go down --- to the point of insignificance, now around 3% world wide --- less than Opera. Paying a huge sum of money for a miniscule market share doesn't provide any reasonable hedge --- as evidenced by the fact that Google is in the middle of an anti-trust lawsuit and FireFox has played virtually no role.
geewee 3y ago
Extremely happy about this. Now I can finally ditch chrome for the foreign pages I couldn't quite navigate myself.
AJRF 3y ago
[flagged]
miohtama 3y ago
What engine is Firefox using under the hood for translations?
- SigmundurM 3y ago
  Seems to be Bergamot: https://browser.mt/ https://browser.mt/
  - coder543 3y ago
    Following the links, it might be using the Marian NMT framework under the hood? I'm wondering where specifically the model weights are coming from, and it would be interesting to read more about the training process[0]. I'm excited to see a more open translation system that seems to perform pretty well and runs locally. It definitely needs to add support for more languages, and based on other models I've seen recently... I have to wonder if building dedicated models for each pair of languages is still the best choice. I believe SeamlessM4T just uses a single model (available in different sizes), and I have definitely seen that Whisper only uses a single model for multiple language pairs as well (although it was only specifically trained to translate into English). Similarly, virtually all of the LLMs are multilingual. It seems like a single model is able to learn shared insights that apply across languages, reducing the amount of training data needed for each additional language (or increasing the accuracy with the same amount of data), but I admit that I could be wrong. This has just been my perception of how things are developing. [0]: Some training info here, it looks like: https://github.com/browsermt/students/tree/master/train-student https://github.com/browsermt/students/tree/master/train-stud...
ape4 3y ago
I tried French to English and it worked well. Anyone know how big the translation data is?
- febed 3y ago
  I think it’s using 4 bit quantized model (32MB - 46MB). See table 5 https://browser.mt/assets/D5.1.pdf https://browser.mt/assets/D5.1.pdf
alberto_ol 3y ago
I tried to translate this headline from the Guardian to Italian: "Ursula von der Leyen praises watered-down vehicle emissions compromise" Firefox translation is wrong: "Ursula von der Leyen elogia il compromesso sulle emissioni dei veicoli annacquati" It is the compronise that is "watered-down" not the vehicles. Google translation is better: "Ursula von der Leyen elogia il compromesso annacquato sulle emissioni dei veicoli" Both Deepl and Papageo don't translate "watered-down" and it could make sense, since "watered-down" can be considered redundant.
- capableweb 3y ago
  > and it could make sense, since "watered-down" can be considered redundant. I don't think that makes sense and isn't correct, a translation should be a translation without subjective copy editing. It may be redundant or not, but it's not the job of the translation tool/service/person to decide.
  - foldr 3y ago
    This is a fairly clear case, but there can be more subtle issues. For example, consider this sentence (that I made up): We got in the car and drove across the island. Google translate renders this in Spanish as follows: Nos subimos al coche y cruzamos la isla. "We got into the car and crossed the island." This preserves the 'across' part but not the 'drove' part, which is left implicit. That is not an accident: in contrast to English, Spanish tends to be 'verb framed' rather than 'satellite framed' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verb_framing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verb_framing). In this particular case the translation is arguably fine because it is obvious from context that the manner of crossing the island was by driving. I am not a native Spanish speaker, but I think that there would be no way to make the 'driving' part explicit in Spanish without it sounding redundant and odd.
    - capableweb 3y ago
      I'm no Spanish native speaker either (only some years experience), but I'm pretty sure your example would be translated to: > Subimos al coche y condujimos a través de la isla > We got in the car and drove across the island. Making it explicit that you drove across the island :)
PurpleRamen 3y ago
And as so often with Mozilla has the translation-feature an awful user experience. It's not showing itself, unless you are on a site with a supported language. And supported means, the language-pack is installed. How are people supposed to discover this? Additionally, the auto-discovery seems to appear only once per domain? I tested it on Wikipedia, and after the first article, it never shows up again. But I guess this is ok, after all that dialog is Fu*ing huge. Couldn't they choose something more subtle? It's their own browser, they should have all the ability to make proper integrations for something like this. This is overall a really great feature, which could have great use for people, but as it's now, it's more likely to be removed again in a while, because "nobody is using it", like so often in the past.
- coffeeaddicted 3y ago
  You can disable that the dialog shows up, then it's just a subtle icon. That it often doesn't show up at all is indeed a bit confusing. I can translate german to english or french to german, but english to anything doesn't seem to show up on english websites even thought it's an option when I'm on a non-english website. Well, it's a beta, so I assume this will change.
  - PurpleRamen 3y ago
    > You can disable that the dialog shows up, then it's just a subtle icon. And then? This would make it even worse, people will easily forget some random icon sitting somewhere.
- tredre3 3y ago
  Thank you for that, I was wondering why the address bar icon wasn't showing up for me. You need to go to the settings, search for Translations, then click install all packs.
anjel 3y ago
Russian translation would have been quite useful
botanical 3y ago
It also had Russian in the Beta but for some reason removed it. It's the one I actually need from time to time
seppel 3y ago
How can I disable this? The popup is super annoying.
yomlica8 3y ago
I've been using the browser add-on for this feature. Did they merge it into the main browser then? My only complaint about it really is that it has no Asian languages.

darkclouds 3y ago

[flagged]

tmpX7dMeXU 3y ago
Are you implying that your stock Edge is feeding you altered text? If so, you should speak to a professional, and I don’t mean a computer professional. EDIT: someone who isn’t me should probably report the literal death threats in your bio.
- darkclouds 3y ago
  [dead]
  - dang 3y ago
    I'm sorry, but we have to ban this account, as posts like this are simply not what the site is for: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. (I mean no disrespect toward the experiences you're articulating, which have obviously been deep and impactful.)
- dang 3y ago
  Please don't cross into personal attack. It only makes everything worse. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

dewey 3y ago

Finally, that extension for Google Translate was really clunky and it was weird that this is coming so late while Chrome had a polished integration for such a long time already.

xnorswap 3y ago
Not wanting to run it via a cloud service was probably a big factor, assuming google translate goes via the cloud. Google has no qualms about sucking up all your data.
- jqpabc123 3y ago
  Google has no qualms about sucking up all your data. Google also has no qualms about you using Firefox. They pay Mozilla $450 mil a year to insure it stays this way.
  - syncbehind 3y ago
    Google absolutely has qualm about you using Firefox. Yes, they pay Moz money to keep them as the preferred search, but that's because it's the better of two options (no data at all from you, or at least your search data). But if you need evidence that Google has qualms about you using other browsers, look at how poorly supported other browsers are for google services.
  - JohnBooty 3y ago
    I don't claim to read minds or have inside information, but there's no doubt in my mind that this is largely a $450mil annual hedge against getting antitrust'd by the DOJ.
    - jqpabc123 3y ago
      Sorry, that argument no longer flies. Goggle payments have done nothing but go up as FireFox market share has done nothing but go down --- to the point of insignificance, now around 3% world wide --- less than Opera. Paying a huge sum of money for a miniscule market share doesn't provide any reasonable hedge --- as evidenced by the fact that Google is in the middle of an anti-trust lawsuit and FireFox has played virtually no role.

geewee 3y ago

Extremely happy about this. Now I can finally ditch chrome for the foreign pages I couldn't quite navigate myself.

AJRF 3y ago

[flagged]

miohtama 3y ago

What engine is Firefox using under the hood for translations?

SigmundurM 3y ago
Seems to be Bergamot: https://browser.mt/ https://browser.mt/
- coder543 3y ago
  Following the links, it might be using the Marian NMT framework under the hood? I'm wondering where specifically the model weights are coming from, and it would be interesting to read more about the training process[0]. I'm excited to see a more open translation system that seems to perform pretty well and runs locally. It definitely needs to add support for more languages, and based on other models I've seen recently... I have to wonder if building dedicated models for each pair of languages is still the best choice. I believe SeamlessM4T just uses a single model (available in different sizes), and I have definitely seen that Whisper only uses a single model for multiple language pairs as well (although it was only specifically trained to translate into English). Similarly, virtually all of the LLMs are multilingual. It seems like a single model is able to learn shared insights that apply across languages, reducing the amount of training data needed for each additional language (or increasing the accuracy with the same amount of data), but I admit that I could be wrong. This has just been my perception of how things are developing. [0]: Some training info here, it looks like: https://github.com/browsermt/students/tree/master/train-student https://github.com/browsermt/students/tree/master/train-stud...

ape4 3y ago

I tried French to English and it worked well. Anyone know how big the translation data is?

febed 3y ago
I think it’s using 4 bit quantized model (32MB - 46MB). See table 5 https://browser.mt/assets/D5.1.pdf https://browser.mt/assets/D5.1.pdf

alberto_ol 3y ago

I tried to translate this headline from the Guardian to Italian: "Ursula von der Leyen praises watered-down vehicle emissions compromise" Firefox translation is wrong: "Ursula von der Leyen elogia il compromesso sulle emissioni dei veicoli annacquati" It is the compronise that is "watered-down" not the vehicles. Google translation is better: "Ursula von der Leyen elogia il compromesso annacquato sulle emissioni dei veicoli" Both Deepl and Papageo don't translate "watered-down" and it could make sense, since "watered-down" can be considered redundant.

capableweb 3y ago
> and it could make sense, since "watered-down" can be considered redundant. I don't think that makes sense and isn't correct, a translation should be a translation without subjective copy editing. It may be redundant or not, but it's not the job of the translation tool/service/person to decide.
- foldr 3y ago
  This is a fairly clear case, but there can be more subtle issues. For example, consider this sentence (that I made up): We got in the car and drove across the island. Google translate renders this in Spanish as follows: Nos subimos al coche y cruzamos la isla. "We got into the car and crossed the island." This preserves the 'across' part but not the 'drove' part, which is left implicit. That is not an accident: in contrast to English, Spanish tends to be 'verb framed' rather than 'satellite framed' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verb_framing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verb_framing). In this particular case the translation is arguably fine because it is obvious from context that the manner of crossing the island was by driving. I am not a native Spanish speaker, but I think that there would be no way to make the 'driving' part explicit in Spanish without it sounding redundant and odd.
  - capableweb 3y ago
    I'm no Spanish native speaker either (only some years experience), but I'm pretty sure your example would be translated to: > Subimos al coche y condujimos a través de la isla > We got in the car and drove across the island. Making it explicit that you drove across the island :)

PurpleRamen 3y ago

And as so often with Mozilla has the translation-feature an awful user experience. It's not showing itself, unless you are on a site with a supported language. And supported means, the language-pack is installed. How are people supposed to discover this? Additionally, the auto-discovery seems to appear only once per domain? I tested it on Wikipedia, and after the first article, it never shows up again. But I guess this is ok, after all that dialog is Fu*ing huge. Couldn't they choose something more subtle? It's their own browser, they should have all the ability to make proper integrations for something like this. This is overall a really great feature, which could have great use for people, but as it's now, it's more likely to be removed again in a while, because "nobody is using it", like so often in the past.

coffeeaddicted 3y ago
You can disable that the dialog shows up, then it's just a subtle icon. That it often doesn't show up at all is indeed a bit confusing. I can translate german to english or french to german, but english to anything doesn't seem to show up on english websites even thought it's an option when I'm on a non-english website. Well, it's a beta, so I assume this will change.
- PurpleRamen 3y ago
  > You can disable that the dialog shows up, then it's just a subtle icon. And then? This would make it even worse, people will easily forget some random icon sitting somewhere.
tredre3 3y ago
Thank you for that, I was wondering why the address bar icon wasn't showing up for me. You need to go to the settings, search for Translations, then click install all packs.

anjel 3y ago

Russian translation would have been quite useful

botanical 3y ago

It also had Russian in the Beta but for some reason removed it. It's the one I actually need from time to time

seppel 3y ago

How can I disable this? The popup is super annoying.

yomlica8 3y ago

I've been using the browser add-on for this feature. Did they merge it into the main browser then? My only complaint about it really is that it has no Asian languages.