{"id":447236,"date":"2022-06-03T14:29:00","date_gmt":"2022-06-03T12:29:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/?p=447236"},"modified":"2022-06-03T14:34:59","modified_gmt":"2022-06-03T12:34:59","slug":"firefox-launches-offline-translation-tool","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/software\/447236-firefox-launches-offline-translation-tool.html","title":{"rendered":"Firefox launches offline translation tool"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mozilla has announced the launch of Firefox Translations<\/a><\/strong>, an offline machine translation tool for the Firefox web browser.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo empower the community to contribute with new languages, we also developed a comprehensive training pipeline to allow enthusiasts to easily train new models, helping expand the add-on reach,\u201d said<\/a><\/strong> machine learning engineering leader Andre Natal.<\/p>\n

Firefox\u2019s offline translation project began in January 2019 through a partnership with the University of Edinburgh, Charles University, University of Sheffield, and University of Tartu.<\/p>\n

Funded by the European Union, it was called Project Bergamot.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe ultimate goal of this consortium was to build a set of neural machine translation tools that would enable Mozilla to develop a website translation add-on that operates locally,\u201d Natal explained.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe engines, language models and in-page translation algorithms would need to reside and be executed entirely in the user\u2019s computer, so none of the data would be sent to the cloud, making it entirely private.\u201d<\/p>\n

Natal said that two novel features also needed to be introduced.<\/p>\n

The first was form translation, allowing users to input text in their language and translate it on-the-fly to the page\u2019s language.<\/p>\n

The second feature was translation quality estimation, where low confidence translations should be highlighted on the page, notifying the user of potential errors.<\/p>\n

This presented a technical challenge as the translation engine was written in programming languages that compile to native code, and don\u2019t run in a web browser.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur solution to that was to develop a high-level API around the machine translation engine, port it to WebAssembly, and optimise the operations for matrix multiplication to run efficiently on CPUs,\u201d Natal said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat enabled us to not only develop the translations add-on but also allowed every web page to integrate local machine translation, like in this website, which lets the user perform free-form translations without using the cloud.\u201d<\/p>\n

Firefox Translate supported Spanish, Bulgarian, Czech, English, Estonian, German, Icelandic, Italian, Norwegian Bokmal and Nynorsk, Persian, Portuguese, and Russian at launch.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are looking for users\u2019 feedback,\u201d Natal said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the add-on, you\u2019ll see a button to fill out a survey that will help Project Bergamot collaborators understand which direction we should take the product.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

Now read: Old iPads could soon run Linux<\/a><\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mozilla has announced the integration of its offline machine translation tool into Firefox.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":447238,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_threads_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[78840,981,975],"class_list":["post-447236","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-software","tag-andre-natal","tag-firefox","tag-mozilla"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/447236"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=447236"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/447236\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/447238"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=447236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=447236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=447236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}