Firefox 118 brings browser-based website translation (no cloud servers required) | Hacker News Reader

Firefox 118 brings browser-based website translation (no cloud servers required)

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144 pointsexz29 comments

I'm glad it finally shipped and that it's implemented fully locally, but it's not very useful to me right now.

The language detection is very unreliable and there doesn't seem to be any way to override it. Also, it's apparently impossible to translate the text if it's in one of your preferred languages.

I’d be happy if the spell checking just worked. I shouldn’t have to go to google for a decent spell check.

Firefox Translations: Translate websites in your browser without using the cloud - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33792447 - Nov 2022 (178 comments)

The plugin based beta had Russian as a translation source language. I wonder why did they remove it in the final release.

I hope it wasn't political. It was really handy the few times I needed it.

The extension isn't described as a beta. Some of the languages within it are noted as beta: Catalan, Persian, Icelandic, Dutch, Norwegian Nyorsk, Russian, and Ukranian. So like Dutch I expect more of them to become built-in to FF in the future.

I'm still on FF117 - can you not continue to use the extension in 118 to keep Russian?

To me, the extension says that full-page translations are now available only by the built-in version. (And this on FF117!)

> Release notes for 1.3.4buildid20230720.091143

> Changed

> - In-page functionality of the addon is replaced by the built-in Firefox integration. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/firefox-trans...

I see the same release note but that version is still offering me full-page translations in FF 117.0.1 (Linux Mint's build, unsure if that could affect things).

I doubt it's political, Czech was included in the extension but is not available now that it's integrated into the browser. I guess more languages will come later.

Has anyone used it? What's the quality and latency like?

On one hand, I love the idea of moving this kind of processing back to local machines after two decades of centralization. But there were reasons the stuff got centralized in the first place. Are we already in a world where high quality translation has been commoditized so much that the models no longer have any intellectual property value, and can provide a good UX even on lower end machines?

Just tried it in on Spanish to French and it took a while on the first run (I guess it downloaded the dictionary) but then it was as fast as Google translate.

Quality is pretty good to understand mainstream news. Some mistakes on words with multiple meanings.

I also tried it on a local TXT file in en=>fr and it works!

I've been using it for half a year or so. Dutch to English isn't perfect, but good enough, despite some glitches. The translation takes a couple of seconds.

I have a pretty similar experience. It's slower and worse translation (at least for Dutch) than the TWP extension, but hey it's local translation and I'd rather use this than send the contents of browser to a 3rd party like google, bing or yandex.

How do you disable the feature entirely? I got a popup today for this today in Firefox, and I don't want any popups.

Its pretty self explanatory. You can select like "never translate language X again" and you do that for the languages you do not want to translated. That cant be that many.

I do not think you are browsing like 10 languages that you do not want translated so you do not need any "disable completely" option. But I guess there is, maybe in about:config if not in the settings.

At least in my FF, the "never translate x language" doesn't seem to work. I needed to tinker with the browser configuration to remove the popup.

> I do not think you are browsing like 10 languages that you do not want translated so you do not need any "disable completely" option.

Ten probably not, but with 4 it's already annoying… Also the translation is bad enough that you may want to disable it entirely to use other services instead (at least that was my experience so far)

I want zero popups from my web browser. One was already one too many. The total number of languages is irrelevant.

Two months later: "oh wow, I can't believe they didn't tell me about (next implemented feature you may care about)"

They have a lot of different users with varying skill levels. One time popups demonstrating new features is a net win for them.

I guess you could build a toggle for "disable tutorials" for the 2% that need it.

> One time popups demonstrating new features is a net win for them.

It's not just a one time popup though.

It's a "net win" for whatever manager and/or engineer is trying to get an internal promotion by externally promote their new feature. Every company seems to want to add popups everywhere in order to promote their new features.

(The worst is GitHub, who are constantly promoting new features that I don't care about.)

about:config then search translat (missing e on purpose. They have "translate" and "translation" options)

How is it implemented?

It's based on https://browser.mt/

Unfortunately, not available on android at this time

If only there were any non-European languages.

Well, it was funded by EU citizens.

https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/825303

Translating between European languages is easier for a couple of key reasons:

1) In most cases, European languages are fairly closely related to each other, so there's less inherent "impedance mismatch" in translation than there would be to a more distant language.

2) The EU translates many of its official documents to the official languages of its member states. This makes for a large corpus of high-quality training material, e.g. https://www.sketchengine.eu/eur-lex-parallel-corpus/

You have to start somewhere. If you wait until you have full coverage of all languages before launching, it'll be years of waiting until you find out whether the concept actually works at all. (Because the goal here is obviously for this to either drive more Firefox adoption, or at least improve retention, they're not just doing it for fun.)

I don’t think it has to cover every single language to be useful, but of the big ones I’m surprised there’s no Chinese or Japanese at all, not even in beta, considering the amount of translation demand.

Chinese, Japanese, and Korean would be the languages I need more often than Western languages. This is usually because there is often an English variant of sites in EU, even sites in India.

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