Firefox is getting language translation • Hacker News Board

Re: Firefox is getting language translation

#21

Post by yoavm » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 9:32 AM UTC

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.

Re: Firefox is getting language translation

#22

Post by jplayer01 » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 9:37 AM UTC

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…

I'm not sure why you'd come to the conclusion that nobody uses on-site translation. Have you never visited a non-English site that you wanted to read/navigate but couldn't? Even if the translation isn't perfect, or even great, it's better than understanding 0 words and it's more than enough to navigate a page or to capture the essence of an article. It isn't a daily occurrence for me, but it happens often enough that I'm glad that this is happening. Switching to Chrome just for that was annoying.

Re: Firefox is getting language translation

#23

Post by Canova » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 9:40 AM UTC

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…

> Translate from any language

only has 9 language options(8 if you exclude the dest language).

Re: Firefox is getting language translation

#24

Post by vertex-four » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 9:42 AM UTC

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…

Being based in Europe, I use on-site translation all the time when looking at things in other countries near me - not everything is translated into English.

Re: Firefox is getting language translation

#25

Post by londons_explore » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 9:43 AM UTC

darkwater wrote: post #11

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 & authentica…

Google is doing that already. They recently released on-device realtime live video captioning for example.

There will always be a performance gap between multi-gigabyte server ML models and client side ones though - and it's up to the users how they prefer the privacy Vs performance tradeoff.

Re: Firefox is getting language translation

#26

Post by Crinus » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 9:52 AM UTC

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…

I do not see the association between elder audiences and on-site translation. Let's say you are a techie and you understand zero Polish yet you got a job in Poland and you want to buy some equipment for your computer from https://www.x-kom.pl/ - how would you do it without on-site translation?

I'm in that situation and i pretty much use Chrome exclusively for on-site translation.

Re: Firefox is getting language translation

#27

Post by rahidz » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 9:55 AM UTC

jeremiahlee wrote: post #3

I 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

I made a post roughly two hours ago on the Firefox Reddit about your add-on getting disabled (a poster there provided me with an excellent workaround), and now come back to HN and this is the top post.

I really really hope this is a coincidence vs. Mozilla having some sort of tiff with Google and us being in the crossfire.

Re: Firefox is getting language translation

#28

Post by distances » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 9:55 AM UTC

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.

Re: Firefox is getting language translation

#29

Post by geraltofrivia » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 9:57 AM UTC

I have a habit of recommending FF to my colleagues. We're based in Germany, and many of us are non-natives. On-page translation is the most common reasons they stick to Chrome.

I hope when this is included in a stable release, it'll convince some of them to make the shift.

Re: Firefox is getting language translation

#30

Post by agiamas » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 9:57 AM UTC

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.

same here. Admittedly it supports just a few language pairs but the translation quality is consistently and considerably better than Google Translate and other major offerings.