[HN Gopher] Firefox 118 brings browser-based website translation...
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Firefox 118 brings browser-based website translation (no cloud
servers required)
Author : exz
Score : 100 points
Date : 2023-09-30 17:32 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (liliputing.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (liliputing.com)
| jsnell wrote:
| Has anyone used it? What's the quality and latency like?
|
| On one hand, I love the idea of moving this kind of processing
| back to local machines after two decades of centralization. But
| there were reasons the stuff got centralized in the first place.
| Are we already in a world where high quality translation has been
| commoditized so much that the models no longer have any
| intellectual property value, and can provide a good UX even on
| lower end machines?
| andrewshadura wrote:
| I've been using it for half a year or so. Dutch to English
| isn't perfect, but good enough, despite some glitches. The
| translation takes a couple of seconds.
| IceWreck wrote:
| I have a pretty similar experience. It's slower and worse
| translation (at least for Dutch) than the TWP extension, but
| hey it's local translation and I'd rather use this than send
| the contents of browser to a 3rd party like google, bing or
| yandex.
| whynotmaybe wrote:
| Just tried it in on Spanish to French and it took a while on
| the first run (I guess it downloaded the dictionary) but then
| it was as fast as Google translate.
|
| Quality is pretty good to understand mainstream news. Some
| mistakes on words with multiple meanings.
|
| I also tried it on a local TXT file in en=>fr and it works!
| no_time wrote:
| The plugin based beta had Russian as a translation source
| language. I wonder why did they remove it in the final release.
|
| I hope it wasn't political. It was really handy the few times I
| needed it.
| crtasm wrote:
| The extension isn't described as a beta. Some of the languages
| within it are noted as beta: Catalan, Persian, Icelandic,
| Dutch, Norwegian Nyorsk, Russian, and Ukranian. So like Dutch I
| expect more of them to become built-in to FF in the future.
|
| I'm still on FF117 - can you not continue to use the extension
| in 118 to keep Russian?
| sleepyfran wrote:
| I doubt it's political, Czech was included in the extension but
| is not available now that it's integrated into the browser. I
| guess more languages will come later.
| saturn_vk wrote:
| Unfortunately, not available on android at this time
| stuaxo wrote:
| How is it implemented?
| m-p-3 wrote:
| It's based on https://browser.mt/
| lapcat wrote:
| How do you disable the feature entirely? I got a popup today for
| this today in Firefox, and I don't want any popups.
| redder23 wrote:
| Its pretty self explanatory. You can select like "never
| translate language X again" and you do that for the languages
| you do not want to translated. That cant be that many.
|
| I do not think you are browsing like 10 languages that you do
| not want translated so you do not need any "disable completely"
| option. But I guess there is, maybe in about:config if not in
| the settings.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| > I do not think you are browsing like 10 languages that you
| do not want translated so you do not need any "disable
| completely" option.
|
| Ten probably not, but with 4 it's already annoying... Also
| the translation is bad enough that you may want to disable it
| entirely to use other services instead (at least that was my
| experience so far)
| lapcat wrote:
| I want zero popups from my web browser. One was already one
| too many. The total number of languages is irrelevant.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Two months later: "oh wow, I can't believe they didn't tell
| me about (next implemented feature you may care about)"
|
| They have a lot of different users with varying skill
| levels. One time popups demonstrating new features is a net
| win for them.
|
| I guess you could build a toggle for "disable tutorials"
| for the 2% that need it.
| lapcat wrote:
| > One time popups demonstrating new features is a net win
| for them.
|
| It's not just a one time popup though.
|
| It's a "net win" for whatever manager and/or engineer is
| trying to get an internal promotion by externally promote
| their new feature. Every company seems to want to add
| popups everywhere in order to promote their new features.
|
| (The worst is GitHub, who are constantly promoting new
| features that I don't care about.)
| ciberado wrote:
| At least in my FF, the "never translate x language" doesn't
| seem to work. I needed to tinker with the browser
| configuration to remove the popup.
| godelski wrote:
| about:config then search translat (missing e on purpose. They
| have "translate" and "translation" options)
| bobthepanda wrote:
| If only there were any non-European languages.
| duskwuff wrote:
| Translating between European languages is easier for a couple
| of key reasons:
|
| 1) In most cases, European languages are fairly closely related
| to each other, so there's less inherent "impedance mismatch" in
| translation than there would be to a more distant language.
|
| 2) The EU translates many of its official documents to the
| official languages of its member states. This makes for a large
| corpus of high-quality training material, e.g.
| https://www.sketchengine.eu/eur-lex-parallel-corpus/
| jsnell wrote:
| You have to start somewhere. If you wait until you have full
| coverage of all languages before launching, it'll be years of
| waiting until you find out whether the concept actually works
| at all. (Because the goal here is obviously for this to either
| drive more Firefox adoption, or at least improve retention,
| they're not just doing it for fun.)
| bobthepanda wrote:
| I don't think it has to cover every single language to be
| useful, but of the big ones I'm surprised there's no Chinese
| or Japanese at all, not even in beta, considering the amount
| of translation demand.
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| Chinese, Japanese, and Korean would be the languages I need
| more often than Western languages. This is usually because
| there is often an English variant of sites in EU, even
| sites in India.
| no_time wrote:
| Well, it was funded by EU citizens.
|
| https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/825303
| peppermint_gum wrote:
| I'm glad it finally shipped and that it's implemented fully
| locally, but it's not very useful to me right now.
|
| The language detection is very unreliable and there doesn't seem
| to be any way to override it. Also, it's apparently impossible to
| translate the text if it's in one of your preferred languages.
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Firefox Translations: Translate websites in your browser
| without using the cloud_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33792447 - Nov 2022 (178
| comments)
| [deleted]
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