
Firefox is getting language translation - jeremiahlee
https://www.zdnet.com/article/firefox-to-get-page-translation-feature-like-chrome/
======
amirmasoudabdol
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)

~~~
distances
> 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.

~~~
_emacsomancer_
> more exotic language pairs

I've found that sometimes what Google does for these is translate from
Language A > English, and then English > Language B, which leads to bizarre
results.

~~~
dredmorbius
From reports, Google Translate has effectively created its own internal (AI GD
ML) metalanguage, which can interpolate between languages it's not been
specifically trained on. E.g., with Japanese <-> English and Korean <->
English, Google Translate can manage Japanese <-> Korean, without being
specifically trained to do so.

So yes, there's an intermediary language. But it's not English.

[https://www.newscientist.com/article/2114748-google-
translat...](https://www.newscientist.com/article/2114748-google-translate-ai-
invents-its-own-language-to-translate-with/)

~~~
bzbarsky
The intermediary language is not English, but due to the way the training set
is constructed (pairs of texts in various languages, with the vast majority of
pairs having English as one of the languages, is my understanding) it can be
very hard to tell apart from English sometimes.

For example, translating "рубанок" ("plane", in the sense of the carpenter's
tool) from Russian to Polish used to produce "samolot" ("airplane") in Google
translate up until sometime earlier this year, because in the intermediate
representation "plane" was ambiguous just like it is in English. It looks like
that particular bit is fixed now, which is at least progress! Maybe they've
been adding more non-English text pairs...

~~~
dredmorbius
That's almost certainly accurate. The metalanguage / interlingua _isn 't_
English, but being based on A <-> English and B <-> English training, is all
but certainly influenced by English grammar, words, and idioms, in ways that
direct A <->B training would not be.

------
chrismorgan
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
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.

------
est31
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
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
> 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-
ue...](https://www.gruenderszene.de/allgemein/deepl-maschineller-uebersetzer-
linguee-google-translate)

------
lifthrasiir
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
To be honest, the website is a bit less than inspiring. Their deliverable for
month 3 was the project website.

~~~
pergadad
Deliverable is funding/contract language. At month 3 any bigger project
bringing different partners together is still in a very early coordination
stage.

------
ktpsns
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.

------
darkwater
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...

~~~
NilsIRL
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
AFAIK Apple already does lot of local device post processing and nobody broke
it

------
Autowired
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.

------
ga-vu
As the article states -- via ZDNet: [https://www.zdnet.com/article/firefox-to-
get-page-translatio...](https://www.zdnet.com/article/firefox-to-get-page-
translation-feature-like-chrome/)

So maybe link to the actual source instead of the blog spam?

~~~
dang
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.))

------
jeremiahlee
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
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
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
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.m...](https://web.archive.org/web/20190520103652/https://careers.mozilla.org/listings/)

~~~
heafield
Hi, I'm the PI of Bergamot. We're funded by this call
[https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-
tenders/opportunities/port...](https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-
tenders/opportunities/portal/screen/opportunities/topic-details/ict-29-2018)
and turned in the proposal on 18 April 2018. The project started 1 January
2019.

------
fimdomeio
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
There's already an "Never for [this site|Language]" option in the translation
bar

------
benbristow
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.

------
z3t4
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.

------
geraltofrivia
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
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-
who...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/translate-whole-page/)

------
drenvuk
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
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
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.

------
timonoko
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.

------
als0
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.

------
godshatter
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.

------
pier25
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
What is high on your list?

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

~~~
heafield
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.

------
SimeVidas
Article from yesterday… Image with Firefox logo already outdated xD

------
quantumfoam
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.

------
hans1729
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)

~~~
mrweasel
Honestly I hope Mozilla will allow me to disable onsite translation to the
point where I wouldn't know it's available.

I'm sure it's a nice feature to lots of people, but I never want to see it.
It's just another annoyance that I don't wish to deal with. Dealing with
multiple language is still something browsers and websites struggle with. Yes,
I know I have a Danish IP, and my language settings is British English, but
just give me the original Swedish version of the content it's FINE.

Much more useful feature, for my use case, would be language detection of
input fields, so I don't have to switch between dictionaries to get the right
spellchecker.

~~~
Aeolun
> Yes, I know I have a Danish IP, and my language settings is British English,
> but just give me the original Swedish version of the content it's FINE.

Given these settings, how would you expect the browser to know you want to see
the Swedish content? You have explicitly indicated that you want British
English (if available).

~~~
unhammer
I would expect/hope setting intl.accept_languages to include "da,sv,en" to be
enough to make it stop translating those (in about:config or through the GUI)

~~~
mrweasel
I have no way of judging the correctness of any given translation of a
language I can't already read, so I would prefer that the browser doesn't do
any automatic translation. Personally I would prefer to not be able to read
the content of a site, compared to getting a translation that may be wrong,
even if it's clearly indicated that it's an automated translation.

