Honestly, I'm not sure if you posted this is support of Horizon or against? The Horizon budget for 2021-2027 is €95.5 billion or ~€15 billion per annum. If a headline "success" is an unfinished implementation of translation in Firefox of a translation engine (Marian) built by the Microsoft Translator team, then it's safe to say Horizon is an unqualified failure.
(I'm a Mozilla employee, but I have not worked on Firefox Translations.)
Before integration, it had ~490 users as an extension, vs ~800,000 for To Google Translate, the number one option.
Offline translation has to be manually enabled per language in Settings.
Frankly I don't believe there's any meaningful usage until I see the numbers.
Do they? I tried opening a French government site[1] and received the Firefox pop-up offering to translate the page. I did not have to enable anything in settings neither is the French language model downloaded. It seems translations are enabled by default.
It's still a niche feature only partially built by a Horizon project (it was almost entirely built by commercial entities - MS and Mozilla) in a niche browser.
It's an indictment of the Horizon programme that this is considered the pre-eminent success story.
I didn't even know it was a new Firefox feature but I thought it was cool.
Well done EU.
If the EU invests into research and development of a feature that a US tech company already offers (as a proprietary, closed-source service), it's needless duplication and a futile effort in catching up.
Yet if it doesn't, that's admitting defeat in the face of competitors and the wrong move as well.
The example we're talking about is powered by a Marian, developed and open-sourced by a US multinational, Microsoft.
The Horizon project was to use that to create a Firefox plugin, which they did.
Another US multinational, Mozilla, later integrated into Firefox.
Firefox has 4.55% market share in Europe.
> Yet if it doesn't, that's admitting defeat in the face of competitors and the wrong move as well.
You are presenting a false and frankly bad faith dichotomy.
(And indeed, as a sibling comment points out, the feature is suggested to users in context, which of course massively helps with discoverability, so it's no surprise to me that it's used way more often than the extension.)
Is this it?
https://glam.telemetry.mozilla.org/fog/probe/translations_re...*
It does look like Microsoft is (was) funding the project, and employs one of the authors as head of research at Microsoft Translator, which is great, but all the "seed" funding and actual research happened in EU. Microsoft hired the author only in 2018 [1], while the earliest EU grant was allocated in 2015 [2], and the main paper they published says "it has mainly been developed at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan and at the University of Edinburgh" [3].
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/in/junczys/
What's unfinished about it?
And Marian also received 6 grants via Horizon, in cooperation with the exact same universities (the one in Edinburgh being the main one), so I'm not sure what's your point?
And did I try to list every success or one tangible example, as the parent asked?
The Horizon/Bergamot project ended with seven languages. Anything thereafter was added separately.
> What's unfinished about it?
The project ended with an unfinished implementation.
> And Marian was also funded by Horizon, also in cooperation with the exact same universities, so I'm not sure what's your point?
No, Marian was funded by MS.
You are revising history extraordinarily to make the most unimpressive project appear better than it was. If Bergamot achieved all its goals and was the exemplar of Horizon, Horizon would be a complete failure.
As it was, the project limped over the line unfinished to be picked up by Mozilla.
And the really important languages for EU/US audiences are, in order, English, Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, Portuguese, German, Italian, which is, guess what, 7 languages...
~~Only Firefox users who explicitly enable offline translation per langauge in Settings use this feature~~, which will be a tiny minority of users in a browser with a tiny (~2.5%) market share.
I'm wrong, the language packs now auto-download.
> And the really important languages for EU/US audiences are, in order, English, Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, Portuguese, German, Italian, which is, guess what, 7 languages...
Well, those weren't the seven languages supported by the Bergamot project when it ended. Only two of your seven were supported: Bulgarian, Czech, English, Estonian, French, Polish, and Spanish.