Mozilla Introduces Offline Translation Plugin for Firefox

Mozilla introduces the offline translation Firefox Plugin, a very young project based on artificial intelligence.

Mozilla has created a translation plugin for Firefox that works offline. Firefox Translations needs to download certain files the first time you translate into a particular language. However, it then uses your system resources to process the translation rather than sending the information to some server for processing.

Mozilla Introduces Offline Translation Plugin for Firefox

This plugin is the result of Mozilla’s work with the European Union-funded Bergamot Project. Participants included the University of Edinburgh, Charles University, the University of Sheffield and the University of Tartu. The goal was to develop neural machine tools to help Mozilla create offline translation features. “The engines, language models, and translation algorithms on the pages must reside and run entirely on the user’s computer, so no data is sent to the cloud, making it all completely private,” Mozilla explained.

According to TechCrunch, one of the big limitations of this plugin at the moment is that it cannot translate between English and 12 other languages. Firefox translations currently only support Spanish, Bulgarian, Czech, Estonian, German, Icelandic, Italian, Bokmål Norwegian and Nynorsk, Persian, Portuguese and Russian. Therefore, no French.

Still a very young project based on artificial intelligence

Mozilla and its partners have created a learning process where volunteers can help train new models to add additional languages. Mozilla would also like feedback on existing models. In other words, Firefox translations are still very young and very mature.

This plugin is very far from the 133 languages ​​supported by Google Translate. Both Apple and Google have mobile apps that can translate offline.

While it may be a little strange that a browser that is by definition used to access the Internet is now getting offline translation, being able to translate text without sending it to any remote computer is a good thing for your safety and respect for your privacy.