I think that all the "hidden in the cloud" services like what Google Photos does, translations, well basically every service Google has, must go "edge computing" in the next years. The hardware side is already powerful enough, even in cheap Android smartphones, we just miss a better, dedicated software.
Basically an Android phone without many Google Services, although there are some, like Google identity & authentication, which useful and online by their nature and you cannot get rid of them easily. And Google Services come as a pack...
Firefox is getting language translation
11–20 of 129 posts
Re: Firefox is getting language translation
#12Before you say that Google has world-class ML engineers and Mozilla doesn't even have a chance of competing, consider that the quality of the startup deepl's translator is comparable and possibly even better to the quality of giants like Google or Microsoft. So this seems like one of those problems where small companies can still be competing with GAFAM-scale ones.
> and possibly even better
It is better.
Google is now just a sluggish tech bully and only shows world-beating performance through acquisitions (such as, sadly, their acquisition of DeepMind).
The Google of 1999 - that a lot of us thrilled to - is long dead.
Re: Firefox is getting language translation
#13I wonder if this explains why Mozilla unexpectedly remotely disabled Page Translator add-on yesterday after previously permitting it to be distributed as a side-load for two years. https://github.com/jeremiahlee/page-translator/issues/26
Likely? I’m inclined to believe that there’s something wrong with your addon, rather than Firefox being anticompetitive about an extension that doesn’t compete with a feature that doesn’t exist yet.
When Mozilla rejected it from being distributed on AMO years ago because it included Google and Microsoft translation libraries externally, they said it could be distributed as a side load, just not on AMO. It hasn’t been updated in a year. The policy position changed yesterday.
Re: Firefox is getting language translation
#14Before you say that Google has world-class ML engineers and Mozilla doesn't even have a chance of competing, consider that the quality of the startup deepl's translator is comparable and possibly even better to the quality of giants like Google or Microsoft. So this seems like one of those problems where small companies can still be competing with GAFAM-scale ones.
All the Google ML experts in the world don't matter if Google translate isn't staffed(no idea if it is or it isn't). It's quite possible that deepl has more engineers and ML experts working on the problem than Google does. Google's deep pockets and easily transferrable roster does have the ability to let it play catch-up very quick though, if anyone with influence thinks deepl has gotten too far ahead.
> It's quite possible that deepl has more engineers and ML experts working on the problem than Google does.
According to this article, they had 22 employees at launch and back then it was already lauded as quite good: https://www.gruenderszene.de/allgemein/deepl-maschineller-ue...
Re: Firefox is getting language translation
#15Wow, I didn't think that people actually use on-site-translation. I know that translation became a lot better (using deepl [0] personally, check it out if you haven't heard of it!) in recent years, but on-site-translation always seemed quite goofy to me. I wonder if this caters more to a broader (elder) audience, making Firefox more attractive to less tech-affine folks? Seems like a critical feature for "your grantpa…
I use on-site machine translation a lot. In fact, I even use that for languages I do understand---at the reduced rate though, alleviating my mental overhead. Of course, you always have to understand that the machine translation can go off and both the common sense and the domain knowledge (including even the tiniest bit of knowledge about the source language) are important.
Re: Firefox is getting language translation
#16Wow, I didn't think that people actually use on-site-translation. I know that translation became a lot better (using deepl [0] personally, check it out if you haven't heard of it!) in recent years, but on-site-translation always seemed quite goofy to me. I wonder if this caters more to a broader (elder) audience, making Firefox more attractive to less tech-affine folks? Seems like a critical feature for "your grantpa…
As someone living in Japan without a deep grasp of Kanji characters, I use on-site translations 10s of times per day.
Re: Firefox is getting language translation
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
Likely? I’m inclined to believe that there’s something wrong with your addon, rather than Firefox being anticompetitive about an extension that doesn’t compete with a feature that doesn’t exist yet.
When Mozilla rejected it from being distributed on AMO years ago because it included Google and Microsoft translation libraries externally, they said it could be distributed as a side load, just not on AMO. It hasn’t been updated in a year. The policy position changed yesterday.
Bergamot was there for at least months (for example, the JD for the Bergamot-Mozilla collaboration was posted before this May [1]) and only advertised a few days ago. It is most likely a coincidence, given that Google and Microsoft has full rights to complain to Mozilla. Or, in the reverse direction, they may have complained because of public articles about Bergamot.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20190520103652/https://careers.m...
Re: Firefox is getting language translation
#18Before you say that Google has world-class ML engineers and Mozilla doesn't even have a chance of competing, consider that the quality of the startup deepl's translator is comparable and possibly even better to the quality of giants like Google or Microsoft. So this seems like one of those problems where small companies can still be competing with GAFAM-scale ones.
> and possibly even better It is better. Google is now just a sluggish tech bully and only shows world-beating performance through acquisitions (such as, sadly, their acquisition of DeepMind). The Google of 1999 - that a lot of us thrilled to - is long dead.
I am in the translation business, and although we do not use MT so far for the verticals we focus on, perhaps what shocks me most is Deepl Alexa 90-day trend [0]. It is so smooth it seems faked.
Re: Firefox is getting language translation
#19Nice. Firefox has been missing this for a while, one of the reasons I often end up switching back to Chrome as it does the translation in-place / in the DOM rather than using a Google Translate proxy frame like Firefox addons do.
Re: Firefox is getting language translation
#20While this is great, I like to give a shout out to DeepL Translator [1]. I'm not affiliated with them but I like to recommend them to people who like to step out of Google ecosystem. I am using DeepL for about a year now and I mostly use it for NL EN, DE EN. So far, I never felt that the translation is off, or terrible, and if not better in some cases, it's as good as Google Translator. [1]: https://www.deepl.com/tra…
I found it to work incredible between Polish and German as well.