The Firefox browser now has a built-in page translator that works even without the Internet::Mozilla has announced the release of an update to its Firefox browser. In version number 118, users will find a significant innovation - a built-in translator
I had to search for it quite a bit to find it. It’s in the (stupid IMO) menu with the three lines, they made to replace the proper menu bar.
If it detects another language on a website, it shows up on the URL bar
Thanks, actually popped up automatically, maybe a first time thing IDK.
It doesn’t detect language as far as I can tell, it seems it just uses the domain name.
Only these languages though:
Bulgarian Dutch English French German Italian Polish Portuguese SpanishThat’s really not good. Literally all of these are European languages.
I’d rather have it connected to a better translation service than have it be offline. I don’t understand why the translator working offline is even a plus. It’s a web browser.
I assume there must not be any FOSS translation services they can use so this offline translator is just a consequence of that.
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It’s for privacy purposes. An online translator requires that all the text you’re reading be sent to a third party, which may or may not use it for nefarious purposes. E.g. maybe you translate your bank account’s web page because there’s a word you don’t know, and now Google knows how much money you have in your bank account.
If you don’t care about that kind of privacy, then there’s no reason you couldn’t use an existing online translator. Firefox has always supported that.
That makes sense, thanks.
That’s fine for translating news articles, but maybe not for private email. Different people accept different risk levels in different situations. If you have reason to be using https then maybe you don’t want to send that data to a third party.
Gets 5 free stuff and bitches for not getting 50. Some people…
I’m sure they would be happy to accept your help in translating a new language.
Yeah this is why I still use at least 1 Google Translate extension in addition to the FF one. Need my Chinese man
Still impressive
Yeah but these websites are usually already localized in English at least to some extent. Many Asian websites would benefit much more from this.
There’s an edge case for Switzerland with 4 official languages but German being the majority. Many websites and documents “forget” to translate into other minority languages.
I need japanese, any news on if that will happen?
No news on that though AFAIK that’s the most requested one. As other comment pointed out currently these languages are WIP:
- Russian
- Persian (Farsi)
- Icelandic
- Norwegian Nynorsk
- Norwegian Bokmål
- Ukrainian
- Dutch
Personally I’d like to see more asian languages as that part of the web is lacking English but those languages are much harder to implement and all of this contribution here is mostly by European universities and organizations.
Nynorsk supporters just never quit do they. Half the country wants it gone and less than 10 percent of the country uses it, still it’s on the list while Swedish and Danish aren’t, lmao.
We already have one language.
Yes but what about a second language?
Me, too. I end up using TWP, and that works pretty well, minus the fact that it’s filtered through either Google Translate, Bing, Yandex or DeepL with an API key.
I really want something that just translates kanji/kana to romaji. There was an extension in Chrome that did that and it’s the only thing I miss after switching to FF.
kanji/kana to romaji
Wow, I never knew that they had a Japanese to Romaji extension. Would furigana extensions work? https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/furiganaize/?utm_source=addons.mozilla.org&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=search
Yeah, furiganaize has an option to display as romaji. https://files.catbox.moe/ocjic8.png
Unfortunately it only works on Kanji (which is probably the hardest part, I guess if there’s no alternative for kana there isn’t enough demand?), but thanks!
It’s really neat IMO. It should’ve been there earlier
Sure. We should have had smart phones in the 80s.
And electric cars too.
While this is theoretically a neat feature, how can I stop it? I don’t want it to offer translation of each and any English page into my native tongue. As most of the Internet is English, this thing pops up everywhere, and at least for English I don’t need it. This is as annoying as Clippy was.
Most of the internet is not in English lol. 45% of the web is in English.
But I share your sentiment.
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You can disable it in the menu that opens when you click on the button at the right of the address bar
It would be nice if that worked, but it doesn’t. I found a “Settings” requester under Language -> Translations where it offers to disable translation for a list of languages, but I cannot add any.
In the annoying popup, there is a cog wheel, clicking that will show a menu. That menu have a checked checkbox, Always offer to translate, uncheck that.
Thanks, that did it.
Each time it offers to translate a page, there’s a “Never translate from [LANGUAGE]” button.
This is a game changer for me. I always loved Firefox and tried to use it exclusively, but living in a foreign country is hard when you’re learning the language, and I had to switch to chrome sometimes due to the lack of translation in Firefox. Now I can finally remove Chrome!
Look for the TWP extension. It’s a fucking godsend, and it’s way faster than FF’s built in translator.
Sadly it uses Google on the backend, so it’s less privacy friendly.
This is odd to me, there have always been translation extensions for Firefox, why swap to Chrome instead of just using one of the many translation options?
I could never find any that worked well, and the translations in chrome were too good.
There are so many translator plugins for Firefox.
I’ve been living in a foreign country for 8 years and Firefox has been a godsend.
I’ve installed the add-on manually a few weeks ago and it works surprisingly well. It’s now my go-to translation tool for websites.
Would be good to have this in the mobile/tablet versions also (I just checked and didn’t see it), as this is my main reason for still using chrome
Would be great to have that on Lemmy Sync app, too! After browsing a while, a large proportion of posts start being in languages I dont understand.
I’ve started blocking communities h that operate in specific languages I don’t know. Im recent memory, a Spanish instance opened and my feed got flooded with posts in Spanish, so I went and blocked these communities not out of ill will but because their posts are meaningless to me except for the odd guessing game what words might mean.
A reliable, integrated translation feature would open a new world of content for me there (though I’m not sure it could translate Spanish memes, unless it supports OCR, and Spanish news are probably of little interest to me)
Lemmy allows you to select the languages you wish to see in settings. It mostly works for me. Mostly, because some posts/comments are “Undetermined”, and if you deselect that, you may miss on some posts and comments.
The majority of content is “undetermined” because most users don’t take the time to set it. You’re likely missing out on more than you realize.
I’m fairly sure I set that, but I might have to double-check
It has online translation if you sign up for Sync Ultra. I believe it uses Google Translate.
Sync app offers translation but only for the paid version and you have to manually choose to translate
Great! I’m assuming the translation models need to be downloaded before first time use? Or are they so tiny in size that they include all of them with the main browser installation?
I quickly tried yesterday and I could do it seamlessly, it worked very well. If you go to the preferences there’s a option to download the languages in parts of 100-200MB/each.
Last time I checked online translators were as shit as 10 years, so I wonder how well this works.
Yeah, they may look fine for people who don’t know language other than their own, otherwise you will just notice that they just translate badly and sometimes even mistranslating (or not translating at all) key words. This is especially true for anything that is not a simple conversation between people, or other simple sentences.
It is also not helpful due how they work - while translating from English or to English may be working occasionally well, using any other language combination such as Polish -> Russian works terrible even though they are more similar to each other than let’s say Polish -> English. “Why?” you may ask. It’s all because it is always translating first to English and then to target language, and that’s a guarantee to shitty translation, but somebody with no knowledge of either basic linguistics or at least intermediate level of foreign language may not be able to comprehend why is that a hard/impossible task.
To put it simply - For any more complicated text you are always sacrificing some context in translation, or make it more ambiguous. If you do it twice you are just making shit up.
Do people actually rate Google Translate that well? I’ve always found it lacking, but then I don’t use it anywhere near habitually.
It’s always gotten the job done for me. /shrug 🤷
I was able to survive in Japan for a week using it and DeepL without knowing Japanese.
Can one use that translation tool from command line?
If you want to dig into it, I believe this is the core project for the translations.
I’m willing to bet you could work something out to make it work
Otherwise there’s always selenium which I imagine would include functionality to do the page translations.
+1 for interest!
If not natively, I bet you could work something out with headless mode, perhaps.
I was using the beta before this and its nice to have it inbuilt but its not quite as good as the beta was. The main drawback with the new approach is that you can’t force the translation if it thinks the page is in English. I use self hosted RSS and I have Translated subsections on that and unfortunately I can’t get the new translator to do the job where the beta would.
For anyone interested in the tech behind that, it’s based on Project Bergamot: https://browser.mt/software (now you don’t need the extension anymore).
You still need an extension for certain languages. It seems like they only have about a dozen available, a few more on the way, and hardly any eastern languages yet.
Production
- Spanish
- Estonian
- English
- German
- Czech
- Bulgarian
- Portuguese
- Italian
- French
- Polish
Development
- Russian
- Persian (Farsi)
- Icelandic
- Norwegian Nynorsk
- Norwegian Bokmål
- Ukrainian
- Dutch
It has multiple translation providers to choose from, but only shows the logo and not a name. I have no idea what the logos are except google translate
I’m guessing this isn’t on mobile yet?
The number of languages available is pretty small but I do appreciate them trying to respect users privacy with this feature
That’s a sick firefox fanart or whatever
It reminds me of the internet of early 2000s
I hope companies abandon this uggly minimalist trend soon. Modern style in general is just soulless and empty. I can look at a building from the 18th Century and say “damn that looks good” but anything made in the last decades is just generic garbage that is forgotten after 2 minutes. There is no identity anywhere anymore, everything is reduced down to the minimum needed and it sucks imo.
Honestly, probably not going to happen. The simple vector designs make scaling to different resolutions very easy
AI generated :/
