Offline Translations for Mozilla Firefox are now available.

Offline Translations for Mozilla Firefox are now available. Mozilla has released Firefox Translations, a new add-on (its version of extensions). As the name implies, this is intended for translations, but the good news is that it is done offline. The translation tool operates locally and is not cloud-based. Here are the specifics.

Translations for Firefox are now available.
Firefox Translations is part of the EU’s Project Bergamot, which also includes the Universities of Edinburgh, Charles University, Sheffield, and Tartu. This plugin is based on neural machine translation tools, which translate the required input using a person’s computer rather than sending the data to external data centers.

It is suggested that the tool will download a few resources initially while translating a given language, but will primarily perform the entire process without sending it to the cloud.

This keeps the entire process private and secure, and prevents third-party data centers from accessing the translated content, which can be important and private at times.

“Our solution to that was to develop a high-level API around the machine translation engine, port it to WebAssembly, and optimize the operations for matrix multiplication to run efficiently on CPUs,” Mozilla wrote in a blog post. This allowed us to not only create the translations add-on, but also to allow every web page, such as this one, to integrate local machine translation, allowing the user to perform free-form translations without relying on the cloud.”

Only 12 languages are currently supported by Firefox Translations: Spanish, Bulgarian, Czech, Estonian, German, Icelandic, Italian, Norwegian Bokmal and Nynorsk, Persian, Portuguese, and Russian. This can be a disadvantage, especially when compared to Google Translate.

However, more languages will be supported in the near future. In addition, Mozilla has introduced a “comprehensive training pipeline to allow enthusiasts to easily train new models, assisting in the expansion of the add-on reach.”

Firefox Translations is now available and simple to install in the Firefox Add-on Store. The company also intends to collect user feedback, so it encourages people to complete a survey available in the add-on. So, what are your thoughts on this new offline translation tool? Please let us know in the comments section below.

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