Mozilla has published the release of the Firefox add-on Firefox Translations 0.4 (previously developed under the name Bergamot Translate) with the implementation of a self-contained machine translation system that runs on the browser side without resorting to external services. To translate from one language to another, the bergamot-translator engine is used, developed as part of the Bergamot initiative by developers from Mozilla together with researchers from several universities in the UK, Estonia and the Czech Republic with financial support from the European Union. The code is distributed under the MPL-2.0 license.
The engine is written in C++ and the intermediate binary representation of WebAssembly is compiled using the Emscripten compiler. The engine is a wrapper on top of the Marian machine translation framework, which uses a recurrent neural network (RNN) and transformer-based language models. GPU can be used to speed up training and translation. Marian is used to power the translation service Microsoft Translator and is developed mainly by engineers from Microsoft together with researchers from the Universities of Edinburgh and Poznan.
Firefox Translations supports translation from Estonian and Spanish into English and vice versa, as well as from English into German. Translation productivity is 500-600 words per minute. There is support for prioritizing the translation of text visible in the browser window. The new version provides the ability to automatically download files with models the first time you try to translate. Model files are approximately 15 MB for each language. Automatic downloading results in a slight delay before the first transfer begins, but dramatically reduces the size of the add-on itself (3.6 MB instead of 124 MB).
The new version also significantly speeds up the loading of models into memory - if previously it took 10-30 seconds to load a model, now models are loaded almost instantly. If the page translation takes more than 3 seconds, the interface provides an indication of the progress of the operation. The translation is carried out sequentially from top to bottom, starting from the visible area. Translated parts are shown as they are ready, while untranslated parts remain in the original language.
Sending of telemetry is enabled, including data on user interaction with the add-on interface (for example, clicking the translation button or disabling translations for certain sites), information about the execution time of operations and technical information about the system (CPU, memory).
For now, the add-on can only be installed in nightly builds of Firefox when checking add-ons by digital signature is disabled (“xpinstall.signatures.dev-root=true” and “xpinstall.signatures.required=false” in about:config). After installing the add-on, Firefox will begin to display a panel asking you to translate for pages whose language is different from the browser language and supported by the add-on. It is possible to disable further display of the panel for a given language or site.
Let us remind you that Firefox already has a built-in mechanism for translating pages, but it is tied to the use of external cloud services (Google, Yandex and Bing are supported) and is not activated by default (to enable it in about:config, you must change the “browser.translation” settings) . The translation mechanism also supports automatic language detection when opening a page in an unknown language and displays a special indicator prompting you to translate the page. The new add-on uses the same interface to interact with the user, but instead of calling external services, it launches a built-in handler that processes data on the user's system.
Source: opennet.ru