Mozilla releases a machine-translation plugin

Posted Jun 3, 2022 8:12 UTC (Fri) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582)
Parent article: Mozilla releases a machine-translation plugin

I gave this a try. Its language coverage is far behind Google, but on some supported languages, it seems about as good as Google Translate, and done on your computer not via the cloud. Impressive.

But these days Google Translate does a decent job with Indian languages which have an entirely different syntax, word ordering, etc (some are not even from the Indo-European family). Mozilla's is still restricted to European languages (and not all: it omits French!) I wonder if it will be feasible to do other languages on a desktop CPU. I feel the Indian government and other interested governments should fund further development, as the EU has so far.

Mozilla releases a machine-translation plugin

Posted Jun 3, 2022 18:01 UTC (Fri) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link] (2 responses)

> on some supported languages, it seems about as good as Google Translate, and done on your computer not via the cloud

Google Translate can work offline as well. The Android app, at least, supports downloading data packs for specific languages and can use it to translate text, audio, and images without an Internet connection.

Mozilla releases a machine-translation plugin

Posted Jun 5, 2022 4:17 UTC (Sun) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link] (1 responses)

Certainly google translate's technology does not require a huge compute cloud for the user. But do you trust google apps with your privacy? I certainly don't.

Mozilla releases a machine-translation plugin

Posted Jun 5, 2022 15:03 UTC (Sun) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]

I had forgotten that this is possible on android. But it is not sufficiently transparent. Indeed, once you are back online you don't know what is being sent upstream.

Competition is good. I hope the offline translation space improves.

Need ukranian language too.

Posted Jun 3, 2022 18:09 UTC (Fri) by Alterego (guest, #55989) [Link] (1 responses)

Incredible that EU has funded this project, and did not require to have German and French !

But the most needed today is ukranian , for refugees and mainly kids in schools who often cannot pay the bill for an unlimited 4G connection they need.

Need ukranian language too.

Posted Jun 4, 2022 8:03 UTC (Sat) by tlamp (subscriber, #108540) [Link]

It has German though?! But there are other European languages missing too, not sure what should single out German and French, I'm sure this will be further extended in the future, IMO there's no point in waiting on every possible language combination being supported before doing a first public release.
Note also that EU Horizon funds are often not funding the full project, but "only" a partial part of the total funds.

I, for one, are extremely happy to get solutions that are independent of Companies with a proprietary focus, especially those residing in countries of which law require to turn over all data of foreign (and sometimes national) users and am thankful for the creators and those funding it.