Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Firefox is getting language translation

zdnet.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 129 posts

Re: Firefox is getting language translation

#61

Post by needle0 »

baq wrote: post #9
amirmasoudabdol wrote: post #4

While 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've just tried it out and am positively blown away by the quality of translation.

I'll be blown away when it does near-perfect JP/EN translation (which it doesn't even seem to support). No machine translation has ever been close to being remotely good when it comes to JP/EN, including the ones developed by GAFAM.

Re: Firefox is getting language translation

#62

Post by needle0 »

tralarpa wrote: post #49
fireattack wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never heard of that website so I give it a try. It says "[t]ranslate from any language", but doesn't seem to support Chinese or Japanese at all. To me, translating other Western languages to English is never a problem. I can use any half-decent online translation services and the result is totally understandable.

> I can use any half-decent online translation services and the result is totally understandable But in the case of deepl, the result is not only understandable but also often (but not always) nearly perfect.

When you're just trying to read stuff to understand it, "understandable" is good enough. I'll be waiting for a looong time for CN/JP/KR translation to reach anywhere close to Not Utterly Incoherent.

Re: Firefox is getting language translation

#63

Post by needle0 »

mantap wrote: post #60
amirmasoudabdol wrote: post #4

While 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…

It looks useful but the lack of non-European languages makes me slightly suspicious, I wonder if their approach generalises to Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, etc.

Perhaps I'm too jaded, but it comes off to me as copping out of the truly difficult ones!

Re: Firefox is getting language translation

#64

Post by chrismorgan »

The demo of https://www.mozilla.org/de/ shows what I consider to be a big missed opportunity in the approach: it only suggests a machine translation, and not to switch to the English page, which is probably a better course of action.

Specifically, the page is marked up with such tags as these:
I would prefer the browser to first suggest “do you want to switch to the English (British) version of this page?”

Sure, I may actually want a machine translation of the text I see on page—the content may be different on the other language’s page; but if the page indicates alternatives are available, I’d prefer to try that first.

Re: Firefox is getting language translation

#65

Post by hombre_fatal »

distances wrote: post #28
amirmasoudabdol wrote: post #4

While 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…

> 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. In my experience Deepl is consistently, without fail, considerably better than Google Translate. I basically use Google now only for more exotic language pairs, or full-page translations.

For Spanish, at least, it definitely isn't better than Google.

And recently everything I had to look up while reading Gabriel García Márquez, DeepL didn't know. After enough failures I gave up and returned to Google Translate for the remainder of the book.

Re: Firefox is getting language translation

#66

Post by z3t4 »

Some years ago when Google translate was released I made a large web app compatible so I didn't have to translate everything manually. Then Google crippled it. One of the cool feature was that you could chat with other users and it would be translated in real time. I'm now planning to add translations to another app, but if it could be done Automatically in Firefox, like with Google translate when it first came out, that would be so awesome. Would save me a lot of work.

Re: Firefox is getting language translation

#67

Post by Moru »

mrweasel wrote: post #36
hans1729 wrote: post #8

Wow, 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…

Honestly I hope Mozilla will allow me to disable onsite translation to the point where I wouldn't know it's available. I'm sure it's a nice feature to lots of people, but I never want to see it. It's just another annoyance that I don't wish to deal with. Dealing with multiple language is still something browsers and websites struggle with. Yes, I know I have a Danish IP, and my language settings is British English, b…

Old browsers could be set as eng, swe, no, dk or some such. Serving up English if available, otherwise fallback. Is this not possible any more?

Re: Firefox is getting language translation

#68

Post by ktpsns »

chrismorgan wrote: post #64

The demo of https://www.mozilla.org/de/ shows what I consider to be a big missed opportunity in the approach: it only suggests a machine translation, and not to switch to the English page, which is probably a better course of action. Specifically, the page is marked up with such tags as these: I would prefer the browser to first suggest “do you want to switch to the English (British) version of this page?” Sure, I ma…

That's so true! Semantic annotations in the HTML header are a missed opportunity for web standards. I'm not meaning Dublin Core (https://www.dublincore.org/ -- declined somehow with SEO engineering), but relational data:
From these six examples, modern desktop Firefox/chrome only displays adding the search engine (when clicking in the search/omni box). RSS died a long death (the availability was removed in Firefox a few months ago). And all other information was only ever displayed by the good old Opera browser, who had a special symbol bar for relational data and even overloaded the prev/next browser navigation buttons with prev/next header suggestions from the page.

Re: Firefox is getting language translation

#70

Post by janeshmane »

amirmasoudabdol wrote: post #4

While 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 was hoping to use them for an application, but their API pricing is orders of magnitude higher than Google's and Microsoft's. I guess they must be focused on the web application primarily.
Post reply on HN