Mozilla Offers Free Offline Translation in Firefox
Mozilla has added an official translation tool to Firefox that doesn’t use cloud processing to do its job, instead running a machine learning-based process right on your computer.
Firefox translations can be added to the browser here. You will need to download some resources the first time you translate a language, the actual translation work is done on your computer, not in a data center a couple of hundred miles away.
This is the result of the EU-funded Bergamot project, in which Mozilla collaborated with several universities on a set of machine learning tools that will make offline translation possible. Typically, this work is done by clusters of GPUs in data centers where large language models will be deployed to translate the user’s request.
The main limitation is probably the lack of languages. Google Translate supports over a hundred – Firefox Translations even supports a dozen: Spanish, Bulgarian, Czech, Estonian, German, Icelandic, Italian, Norwegian Bokmal and Nynorsk, Persian, Portuguese and Russian. It overlooks quite a bit, but this is just the first release of a project by a non-profit organization and a group of scientists, and not the preeminent product of a multi-billion dollar internet empire spanning the world.
