Mozilla has released the Firefox Translations add-on. The new tool was created as part of The Bergamot Project, which aims to provide a web page translation option that runs directly on users’ machines while maintaining their privacy. The add-on will use the user’s computer resources to translate text in and out of any language, and the data will not be sent to the cloud for processing. It is currently available for translation in eight languages, with work on four more languages underway.
Firefox Translations add-on is now available for download on Firefox Nightly, Beta, and General Release, according to Mozilla. The tool allows for automated local client-side translation of web content. The Bergamot Project Consortium, led by the University of Edinburgh, collaborated on the project with partners Charles University in Prague, the University of Sheffield, the University of Tartu, and Mozilla.
Firefox Translations, according to Mozilla, has two new features. According to Mozilla’s blog post, “the first feature is form translation,” and “the second feature is quality estimation of the translations,” where “low confidence translations should be automatically highlighted on the page, in order to notify the user of potential errors.”
English, Spanish, Estonian, German, Czech, Bulgarian, Norwegian Bokmal, Portuguese, and Italian are among the languages for which translation is available. Russian, Persian (Farsi), Icelandic, and Norwegian Nynorsk are among the languages being worked on.
Meanwhile, Google Translate, its biggest competitor, now supports translation for a total of 133 languages spoken around the world. During the Google I/O keynote, the company announced that Google Translate now supports 24 new languages, all of which are supported by machine learning.
