Google is a bit better of course with many common expressions but I'm sure that can run locally too if they'd want to. Mozilla just has don't catching up to do because they don't monetize our data. So less budget to work with.
https://github.com/marian-nmt/marian-dev/
It’s compiled c++ running using wasm.
This is still using Google's cloud to host the models and your browser has to repeatedly download them on demand. We shouldn't need to depend on Google at all, but with Firefox Translations we still do and they're still collecting data about us.
I'm not sure why this is done because this kind of filehosting is easily replaced by something more privacy-friendly.
In this case, I agree that this is, largely, a "Good Thing" although not unqualified since some number of users who wouldn't have otherwise will end up repeatedly sending data to Google, probably without even being aware of it. The data they'd give up is (to me at least) small compared to the data they would have been surrendering to online translation services, but that's not really the point.
It just don't understand how they stared from "Protect your privacy from sites like translate.google.com by using this add-on to translate webpages locally!" and ended up at "Let's make firefox users connect to Google's servers every time they use this feature!" If you're creating a product designed for people concerned about their privacy, it should beyond obvious that making your users send data to Google is a problem.
It's not like they couldn't host those files themselves at mozilla.org or (as others have pointed out) just keep them locally and avoid making a bunch of unnecessary connections to a remote host entirely. If they'd done that it would also allow Firefox Translations to work when you aren't connected to the internet.
It's really not hate though. It's love and concern. I love Firefox, and I want it to do better!
Don't you think that except for the PII data which shouldn't be used for training at all those (training) datasets can be stored at any place and it does not make a difference from the privacy point of view? Or I wrongly interpret their purpose...
I've been using this extension for many months now and that's exactly how it already works. You're just plain wrong.
Mine downloaded it once, didn't notice it happening after that.
And hard to stop it from using wifi when it's available.
Google Translate has its uses, but nice to have an offline (as in... uhhh free speech?) translator as an option.
Would be cool to have Firefox Translations integrated into TOR.
If you use Google Translate, of course it does because everything is done on their servers
> Would be cool to have Firefox Translations integrated into TOR.
Tor Browser is just a forked firefox so this should not be too difficult. I believe they disable addons by default because they can leak data and they can't check all addons for this. Not sure if you can switch it back on though. I suppose they could validate this one as it's so important. I would recommend submitting a feature request to the tor project.
> If you use Google Translate, of course it does because everything is done on their servers
As mentioned by GGP, the Google Translate app for Android (at least) allows you to download the model for a given language (pair?), after which you no longer need any kind of Internet connection to translate. That implies everything is done locally, not on Google’s servers. GP’s question was whether the app will still save your queries and submit them once a connection becomes available just to scratch that data collection itch.
disclaimer: googler
This can be tested. Translate shows up in your Google 'My Activity' page, so you can do some offline translations, then switch the network back on, and see if the translations show up in My Activity. Assuming you can trust the My Activity page to be complete and accurate (my opinion is you can, but i would say that)
and FTR: I've actually just tried it and offline translations do not show up in my activity so I highly doubt they're being surreptitiously uploaded.
This isn't true. Google claims this, but it just doesn't work that way: I've had many, many cases of trying to translate stuff with a bad cellular data connection and it doesn't work, even though I have the language pack downloaded.
Also, Microsoft's Translator app can do the same (offline translation for text) and IME is about on par with Google).
Interesting, I'll have to try this.
Well, I tried installing the app and using image translate mode on some Japanese and the results were not very good, not nearly as good as Google Translate. I'll try it out later with regular text.
I also looked at the phrasebook feature. That's a pretty neat idea actually. However, for some really strange reason it defaulted to showing me phrases in Spanish. I have no idea why it thinks I would want to speak Spanish (My system language is English, and I live in Japan, so obviously I want to convert to Japanese. No one speaks Spanish here.)
I think the honest truth is that Japanese is the ultimate challenge of any translation too.
My Japanese friends tell me that DeepL is about as close as you will ever get to a passable translation quality.
But DeepL does not do image translation.
On a recent trip to Japan I installed six image translation apps on my phone.
None were perfect, I found Naver Papago to be the most consistently usable (although it was far from perfect).
Interesting observations I made during the extensive testing:
1) The majority of image translation apps don't like Japanese when written vertically, I found they perform best with horizontally written Japanese.
2) All image translation apps *REALLY* don't like hand-written Japanese. Some of them *MIGHT* translate *SOME* of the text. But really all of them only really work consistently with machine-printed text.That said, let my give my HN 2c and say that Google Translate is pretty bad these days. It’s community/user adjustments, for example, are guaranteed to be bad. In Spanish, you instantly know you’re looking at a user “correction” because the translation has no accents. “como estas”. It’s bad in 100% of cases, every time I see that “user verified” symbol.
I think the offline model doesn’t have the user adjustments, but the offline model also seems to be lower quality. Back when I translated a lot, I used to know when my internet was offline mid session because of the difference in translation quality.
I get it that the server translations are better, but currently I’m not seeing any translation at all. You, Google Translate developer, should catch the error and show the offline translation instead.
Yeah, on a spotty mobile connection, most services tend to be optimistic that it’s better to wait than to assume your internet is down. iOS online/offline callback is very optimistic, probably because for most services, trying something in a degraded 20b/s conn is better than giving up and going “sorry, no internet.” (Funnily enough, the iOS App Store gives up way too soon)
So I agree. I think the right thing to do is to do an instant translation with the local model, when available. Maybe a cherry on top is to see if the server has a better translation in the background.