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Firefox is getting language translation

zdnet.com

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Re: Firefox is getting language translation

#121

Post by tralarpa »

needle0 wrote: post #62
tralarpa wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Me, too, me, too. Knowing a little bit of Chinese, I can understand that this is not an easy job for an AI. Too much context dependend stuff. Or maybe, there are simply not enough bilingual documents for the training. That's the great advantage of the European union :)

Re: Firefox is getting language translation

#122

Post by cyberax »

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…

OK, some observations. It looks like they used the UN official documents as a part of their corpus, so it translates regular news from Russian into English almost perfectly. I was actually stunned how good the translation was.

But once you step away from it, quality goes down. I tried translating random pieces of Russian literature and it makes obvious mistakes. It can't even manage the structure of sentences, never mind word choice.

Translations from English are also bad. For example, it translated "I never felt that the translation is off" as "I never felt that the translation is turned off".

Re: Firefox is getting language translation

#123

Post by heafield »

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…

Hi, I run the Bergamot project adding this function. We're planning to launch as an add-on or plug-in experience.

Re: Firefox is getting language translation

#124

Post by heafield »

lifthrasiir wrote: post #17
jeremiahlee wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/htt…

Hi, I'm the PI of Bergamot. We're funded by this call https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/port... and turned in the proposal on 18 April 2018. The project started 1 January 2019.

Re: Firefox is getting language translation

#125

Post by heafield »

needle0 wrote: post #59
drenvuk wrote: post #34

I'm having trouble finding which languages this supports. I am mostly in need of eastern Asian languages like Chinese, Korean and Japanese. Will this support them?

I second this. Bergamot's website mentions Europe ("...increases the uptake of language technologies in Europe...") but nothing about Asia, which isn't very encouraging.

It's we're funded by the EU and the languages we're contractually obliged to launch are select EU languages. However, if successful, we hope Mozilla and the community will build more languages. We are are that CJKV is an important market.

Re: Firefox is getting language translation

#126

Post by heafield »

wojciechpolak wrote: post #99

I'd like to see a similar effort, but to replace Grammarly (i.e. make it private, secure, and offline)

Actually, the winner of the shared task on grammatical error correction https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/nl/bea2019st/ is https://neural.mt/papers/edinburgh/bea19.pdf which uses the same machine translation codebase, Marian, as the Bergamot does.

Re: Firefox is getting language translation

#127

Post by heafield »

yoavm wrote: post #21
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…

Not heaving in-page translation is the main reason my friends wouldn't switch to Firefox. It's also why I sometimes launch Chrome. Living in a foreign country, you often you have to login and fill in forms in a language you don't know. Being able to translate the whole page in place is extremely useful.

Bergamot has an entire work package devoted to helping you fill out forms in a language you don't speak, while being confident that your answers are correct. We're testing out concepts here: https://github.com/zouharvi/ptakopet .

Re: Firefox is getting language translation

#128

Post by sorpigal »

School-Cotton wrote: post #101
lucb1e wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another Luc here that lives in Germany since a bit (yes, I know you said "for a bit") and recommends Deepl to everyone over Google :D

I’m not sure about European English, but at least in American, it’s not normal to say “I live in Germany since a bit”. If you don’t live there anymore, you could say “I lived in Germany for a bit”. If you still live there, you could say “I have lived in Germany for a bit”

Based on some (limited) experience with people for whom German is L1 who are speaking English I suspect (without knowing any German myself) that this is a typical formation that a native German speaker would use when intending to form a "for a bit" phrase in English. tl;dr, I think it was a joke.

Re: Firefox is getting language translation

#129

Post by dang »

ga-vu wrote: post #37

As the article states -- via ZDNet: https://www.zdnet.com/article/firefox-to-get-page-translatio... So maybe link to the actual source instead of the blog spam?

Changed belatedly now. I didn't see this comment sooner. If you want to be sure we get information, emailing hn@ycombinator.com is the way. (That's in the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.)
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