Mozilla, the firm behind the popular web browser Firefox, has added translation tools to Firefox that don’t rely on cloud processing to do their job.
The company has also rolled out other features to improve the user experience.
“In January of 2019, Mozilla joined the University of Edinburgh, Charles University, the University of Sheffield and the University of Tartu as part of a project called the EU-funded Project Bergamot,” the company said in a blogpost.
Also read: Instagram Reel Now Lets You Record Clips For 90 Seconds, Add Your Own Audio
“The ultimate goal of this consortium was to create a set of neural machine translation tools that would enable Mozilla to develop a website translation add-on that operated locally, i.e. the engine, language model, and in-page translation algorithms could be adapted to live and will be executed entirely in the user’s computer, so no data will be sent to the cloud, making it completely private,” it added.
In addition, two novel features need to be introduced.
The first is the translation of forms, allowing users to input text in their own language which is dynamically translated on-the-fly into the language of the page.
The second feature is a quality estimation of translations where low-confidence translations should be automatically highlighted on the page to inform the user of potential errors.
“This set of requirements posed a number of technical challenges for the team: the translation engine was written entirely in programming languages that compile down to native code,” the company said.
“We needed a way to streamline the delivery of the project to avoid the overhead involved in providing a build compatible with all platforms supported by Firefox A that would be impractical to scale and maintain,” it added.
Mozilla said the solution was to develop a high-level API around the machine translation engine, port it to WebAssembly, and optimize the operation of matrix multiplication to run efficiently on the CPU.
The company said, “This not only helped us develop a translation add-on, but also allowed every web page to integrate local machine translation, such as in this website, which would allow the user to have free-to-use translations without having to use the cloud,” the company said. Lets translate form.”
The Translate add-on is now available for installation on Firefox Nightly, Beta and General releases in the Firefox Add-ons Store.
read all breaking news , today’s fresh news And IPL 2022 Live Updates Here.