Mozilla Firefox Translate is enabled for offline translation

Mozilla has introduced a new add-on (its version of an extension) called Firefox Translate. As the name suggests, it is meant for translation but the good part is that it is done offline. The translation tool works locally and does not rely on the cloud. Here are the details.

Firefox Translations is part of the EU's Bergamot Project, which involves the University of Edinburgh, Charles University, University of Sheffield, and the University of Tartu. This plugin is based on the Neural Machine Translation tool, which uses a person's computer to translate the required input instead of sending the data to an external data center.

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

This makes the entire process private and secure and does not allow third-party data centers to access the content for translation, which can sometimes be sensitive and private.

Mozilla said in a blog post, “Our solution was to build a high-level API around the machine translation engine, port it to WebAssembly, and optimize the operations for matrix multiplication to run efficiently on the CPU. This not only enabled us to develop translation add-ons but also allowed each web page to integrate local machine translation, such as this website, allowing the user to perform free-form translation without using the cloud.

Firefox Translate currently supports only 12 languages, namely, Spanish, Bulgarian, Czech, Estonian, German, Icelandic, Italian, Norwegian Bokmål and Nynorsk, Persian, Portuguese and Russian. This can be a drawback and is quite low compared to Google Translate.

But, more languages ​​will be supported soon. To that end, Mozilla has also launched an "extensive training pipeline to help enthusiasts easily train new models, helping expand add-on availability."

Firefox translations are now available in the Firefox Add-on Store and can be easily installed. The company also wants to get user feedback and as a result, requests people to fill out a survey available in the add-on. So, What are your thoughts, on this new translation tool that works offline? Let us know in the comments below.