Firefox To Get Page Translation Feature, Like Chrome (zdnet.com) 50
An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla developers are working on adding an automatic page translation feature to Firefox, similar to the one included in Google Chrome. However, Firefox's page translation feature will be different from the one supported in Google Chrome. Instead of relying on cloud-based text translation services (like Google Translate, Bing Translator, or Yandex.Translate), Firefox will use a client-side, machine learning-based translation library, currently being developed part of the Bergamot Project, which received $3.35 million in EU funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.
!cloud == privacy (Score:5, Informative)
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This is a nice privacy feature and should be more resilient in the long term than any corporate cloud service.
True, but it will add even more bloat just to provide something probably used rarely by individuals.
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Depends, it implemented as a shared library it would only be loaded if necessary and not introduce any bloat for people not using the feature.
It wouldn't be loaded into RAM, but the shared library would still reside on disk.
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True, but it will add even more bloat just to provide something probably used rarely by individuals.
It's becoming more relevant all the time, as countries which don't speak English put more useful data online. I only wish they'd make it an addon, even if bundled, so that I could remove it from installs where I don't need it.
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Would you be interested in joining a user study? The difficulty with addons is that WebAssembly doesn't support vector instructions over 128 bits wide, which make neural machine translation's matrix operations faster.
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Sure, sounds interesting. My posted email is current.
Well, patch it out. (Score:2)
It's open source.
Since I do this often, he's how to quickly do it on Gentoo: /var/tmp/portage/*/*/work.)
1. Unpack the source package to some directory "a". (This is quickly done with: ebuild $(equery w firefox) prepare, and then renaming whatever is in
2. Make a copy in "b".
3. Search the version management of the project of a commit that added what you want to get rid of, and download it as a patch.
4. Reverse-apply the patch to "b", using the "patch" tool. *fingers crossed*
5. Manually edit "b" to change what
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I used to run Gentoo back when I had a K6, and I had some reason why I needed a special build for performance reasons. But the last time I tried it, using even just a couple of USE flags meant the install failed, and the USE flags are the whole reason why I wanted to run gentoo, so I gave up on it. I'm not going to fight with the fucking install when there are so many distributions that actually work.
As an Unamerican... (Score:3)
I can guarantee you, that it will be the most used feature in the world! Even more than ad blocking.
Only anglophone countries (and maybe Spanish and Chinese ones) can afford to not use sites from other languages. (Many laguages have comparatively small communities.)
E.g. in German, questions on forums / bulletin boards *always* get *completely* derailed. By pointing out nitpicky side-topic problems, going off on meta-discussions, giving stupid and useless answers, often including deliberate non-common-sense
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>"True, but it will add even more bloat just to provide something probably used rarely by individuals."
+1000
It sounds like a great feature. But Mozilla- PLEASE make stuff like this ADDONS. We don't need or want everything "included" or "integrated" into the core browser. Remember your Firefox missions (as I have always known them)- SMALL, fast, standards-compliant, secure, open development and source, private, configurable, multiplatform. All those objectives are important.
Additional code that can't
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Our current launch plan is browser addon or plugin. That got lost in the news articles. I'm the project coordinator.
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>"Our current launch plan is browser addon or plugin. That got lost in the news articles. I'm the project coordinator."
Thanks for the info, and the good news, too. It is nice to see people actually in the project posting to Slashdot. And yeah, lots of articles (and especially Slashdot titles and summaries) get info wrong, omit info, or are misleading (slanted).
It sounds like some GREAT ideas. Just because it isn't something I would use much doesn't mean I don't support it- a LOT of people will find it
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Accuracy would change use. The more accurate the translation, the less likely companies will produce multiple different language web sites. Built into your browser with a flag on the web page and you download and store that translation for that use and future uses. The savings for web companies huge, only have to deal with one language but they would have to avoid using text in an image.
Forums could be real interesting, you text translated and inserted as you read other language comments in your language, r
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You can bet on the average user not giving a shit about privacy, and only focusing on the client-side translator sucking major ass compared to Google's cloud-based privacy nightmare of an offering.
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The question here is - who do the translation, and who profits from it?
If I want something specifically translated then I can do that already from Google Translate.
I want more privacy built in rather than flashy features. If the browser would keep third party cookies and similar stuff in a different container depending on main site so that different contexts would be isolated from each other. No way for cross site tracking then.
Re:!cloud == privacy (Score:5, Informative)
Your desktop does the translation. The models will be trained on a cluster at Mozilla. I run the project.
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Re:!cloud == privacy (Score:5, Informative)
That's a good suggestion! The main difficulty with PDF files is you have to reassemble soft-returns into sentences (but not hard returns), possibly OCR, avoid page numbers in the middle of things, etc. It's doable with heuristics but a lot more software is involved.
How about better spell checker. (Score:2)
My biggest complaint with Firefox is its spell checker. I am not a proficient speller, and I will often get some simple word wrong. Where I try to select the word and get suggestions they give me results that are not even close phonetically (eg it gave me parenthetically). It is often to a point I will google search my misspelling to get the appropriate correct word spelling.
Perhaps because I am an english speaker, so most pages are in english, and translating a website isn't the big of need.
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My biggest complaint with Firefox is its spell checker. I am not a proficient speller, and I will often get some simple word wrong. Where I try to select the word and get suggestions they give me results that are not even close phonetically (eg it gave me parenthetically). It is often to a point I will google search my misspelling to get the appropriate correct word spelling.
Perhaps because I am an English speaker, so most pages are in English, and translating a website isn't that big of [a] need.
You were certainly correct on getting the simple word wrong.
Not that I'm a particularly good speller myself (and will freely admit that my grammar can be downright atrocious) but I just couldn't resist.
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The problem with english is its exceptions. Here in this sentence "english" is not even red underlined. So it is English ... I did not learn that in school. I learned it in /. posts, german on the other hand is red underlined ... no idea why it is not the same (well it is Chrome, which for some absurd reason claims it would use the OS spell checking, but does not.
Anyway: that "a language" is a name and needs/should be capitalized is not obvious.
languagetool (Score:2)
Languagetool is an advanced checker with support for grammar checking [languagetool.org].
The big advantages:
- you can install it locally [languagetool.org]
- the firefox extension can be pointed [mozilla.org] to this local installation
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A third party tool...
So what will it send over to the cloud for analysis.
I have some amount of trust in Mozilla to keep my data private, but not for any 3rd party add in.
The German one is CATASTROPHIC. (Score:3)
In Germany, Firefox is the most popular browser. That dictionary is used in a lot of other software too.
And it single-handedly ruined the German language!
See, im German, a multi-word term is *never EVER* written with spaces. You always use compound words (simply sticking them after each other), or if that gets too large and confusing, you may use a dash. On line breaks, you use a dash too. That is *not optional*.
Yet, what that spell checker / dictionary does, is whenever it does not know a compound word (wh
P.S.: Murphy's law ... (Score:2)
Write a post about not making mistakes while writing ... and you're sure it WILL be full of them. XD
Why does Slashdot not have a preview function on mobile though? I know it is a zombie site, but come on!
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I can't speak to the spellchecker. But the translation system is able to handle German compounds via Byte Pair Encoding: https://github.com/rsennrich/s... [github.com] .
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You always use compound words
That is no longer true since "Rechtschreibreform". Especially if you translate from foreign languages it is perfectly legal to translate software system as "Software System".
However I agree with you about the other mess ... I don't really need spell checker for german, or in other words, I don't care if I make a typo. But for foreign languages it is quite important that it works.
Bad title (Score:4, Insightful)
"Firefox to get offline page translation feature - unlike Chrome"
There you go.
Useful (Score:4)
Re:Useful (Score:5, Informative)
It is and will be FOSS with an API that allows integration outside Firefox. The code is a combination of Mozilla Public License and Marian https://marian-nmt.github.io/ [github.io] under MIT license, as well as software to be written. Follow our code on https://github.com/browsermt/ [github.com] and https://github.com/marian-nmt/... [github.com] .
I coordinate the Bergamot project.
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It sounds neat. Do you have any examples of translations anywhere?
I can only find information about translation speed where this combination will be at an instant advantage compared to Google that has to contact a server somewhere.
But as far I am aware translation is not a completely solved problem yet so it's pretty important how well it is actually doing in practice?
Since I doubt it will be client-side only (Score:2)
Re:Since I doubt it will be client-side only (Score:5, Informative)
It will be offline. Here's an earlier paper of ours on efficiency: https://neural.mt/papers/edinb... [neural.mt] . Since then we've improved to 982 words per second per core on a Skylake with ~38 MB RAM consumption.
I https://neural.mt/ [neural.mt] coordinate the Bergamot project (https://browser.mt/) which is a consortium of the University of Edinburgh (lead), University of Tartu, University of Sheffield, Charles University in Prague, and Mozilla.
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I doubt it will stay offline only. That is another stream of data to monetize.
You seem to be confusing Mozilla ... (Score:2)
... with a for-profit coproration.
Or the EU with the USA. (Although that gets more and more understandable.)
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sounds awesome, thanks for taking the time to come by and explain it in more detail
Does this actually exist yet? (Score:2)
I just downloaded Firefox Nightly, and only see translation features for Bing, Google. and Yandex, and nothing else.
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Not in a user-friendly way, but we're working on it! Follow our code at https://github.com/browsermt/ [github.com] and we'll announce features on https://twitter.com/bergamotpr... [twitter.com] .
Sounds like a great extension (Score:3)
This is one of numerous features -- like phishing protection -- which would be great as an official extension for people that actually want it, easily uninstalled for people who don't.
(A reminder that the classic extension model wasn't just about piling on new crap: it was also about opting out of things that are useless to you for a leaner browser.)
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This was my first thought. Large, complex stuff is still being integrated at the core level, while simple things (even those that a large number of people want) require extensions.
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We've been debating a few integration options including an extension, a plugin with an install on first usage, or a captive process that Firefox launches and communicates with. Part of this depends on how much performance we can get out of WebAssembly vs native C++ code with CPU-specific routines. I'm the project coordinator.
Which languages (Score:2)
Which languages does it support?
Hungarian ? ("My hovercraft is full of eels.")
Ukrainian (I would like you to do us a favor, Though.)
Esperanto (Oh wait, thats not a language, thats the Secretary of Defense
For this rare occasion, may I use this prepared .. (Score:2)
... statement:
HELL YES! OOOH YEAAH! FIREFOX 1, CHROME 0. CHECK AND MATE, BABY!
*corrects collar with both hands*
I do hope you find my deliberations fruitful and reasonable.
Deep Leaning seems so slanted (Score:1)
Mozilla Firefox, popular web browser.
Deep Speech: Deep Leaning STT Engine, localizable speech-to-text engine that uses deep learning techniques to transcribe speech to text. It has more than 9,400 stars, and over 1,600 forks on GitHub repository.
TTS: Deep Leaning TTS Engine, Localizable text-to-speech engine that uses deep learning techniques to s
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Yes, we are worried about bias in translation. Here's a specific example from people we collaborate with: https://genderbiasnlp.talp.cat... [talp.cat]
more bloat (Score:2)
Great! (Score:2)
This is a *good* thing. I have tried all the existing translation extensions for Firefox and none of them work as well as the built-in Chrome translator for the range of Japanese web pages (especially forms) that I need to translate into English.
Using the Google Translate website via Firefox is inconvenient and also fails for content where the built-in Chrome translator just works.
I am hoping the Firefox translator will fix these problem.