Vivaldi gets a privacy preserving translation service
Vivaldi Technologies released a new browser snapshot of the next version of the company's today. The new snapshot introduces a much requested feature: web translations.
Up until now, Vivaldi users have to rely on web services or browser extensions to introduce translation functionality in the web browser. Most extensions rely on Google Translate or Microsoft Translate, and that means that connections to these services are made whenever translation functionality is accessed.
Vivaldi's translate feature uses a different approach, one that preserves the privacy of users. Instead of relying on an external service like Google Translate, it is using a self-hosted service. While that is not the same as local translations, something that Mozilla hopes to introduce with Project Bergamot, it is preferable to sending information to third-party services.
Vivaldi Techologies partnered up with Lingvanex, a company that has created translation services, including APIs and applications. If you have never heard of them before, you may head over to the main website to test the translation service right on the site.
Vivaldi's implementation is somewhat limited right now, as the number of languages is limited when compared to the supported languages by Lingvanex. Plans are underway to introduce support for additional languages and functionality to the Vivaldi web browser in the future.
For now, it is a "public test" of the functionality.
If you have updated Vivaldi to the latest version already -- you can check the version by loading vivaldi://about/ and the feature was introduced in 3.8.2238.3 -- then you may use the translation feature already. Whenever you visit a non-native language, e.g. a German page in an English language version of Vivaldi, you will see a new translation icon in the address bar. To be precise, on the right side of the address bar.
Activate it to open the "translate page" menu. It allows you to select a target language at the time of writing, but nothing else. The initial implementation supports 22 different languages including English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Icelandic, Russian and Turkish.
Select the translate button to translate the entire page to the selected language. A quick test with several German pages and the translation language English was only partially successful. On some pages, e.g. this Wikipedia page or this Heise page, only some of the content was translated. The result was a mix of German and English words in some sentences.
Sentences with full translations sounded good on first glance. A quick test of French to English translations painted a better picture, as these did not include the mix of languages on the translated pages. Improvements will be made before the feature lands in Vivaldi stable.
Closing Words
Translation functionality is a popular feature, and the integration of a self-hosted solution will surely be welcomed by many users of the browser and new users alike. It is too early to tell how the translation service compares to established solutions.
Now You: Do you require translation functionality in your browser of choice?
Doesn’t Windows 8 know that www. or http:// are passe ?
Well it is a bit difficulty to distinguish between name.com domains and files for instance.
I know a service made by google that is similar to Google bookmarks.
http://www.google.com/saved
@Ashwin–Thankful you delighted my comment; who knows how many “gamers” would have disagreed!
@Martin
The comments section under this very article (3 comments) is identical to the comments section found under the following article:
https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/15/netflix-is-testing-game-streaming-on-tvs-and-computers/
Not sure what the issue is, but have seen this issue under some other articles recently but did not report it back then.
Omg a badge!!!
Some tangible reward lmao.
It sucks that redditors are going to love the fuck out of it too.
With the cloud, there is no such thing as unlimited storage or privacy. Stop relying on these tech scums. Purchase your own hardware and develop your own solutions.
This is a certified reddit cringe moment. Hilarious how the article’s author tries to dress it up like it’s anything more than a png for doing the reddit corporation’s moderation work for free (or for bribes from companies and political groups)
Almost al unlmited services have a real limit.
And this comment is written on the dropbox article from August 25, 2023.
First comment > @ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm
For the God’s sake, fix the comments soon please! :[
Yes. Please. Fix the comments.
With Google Chrome, it’s only been 1,500 for some time now.
Anyone who wants to force me in such a way into buying something that I can get elsewhere for free will certainly never see a single dime from my side. I don’t even know how stupid their marketing department is to impose these limits on users instead of offering a valuable product to the paying faction. But they don’t. Even if you pay, you get something that is also available for free elsewhere.
The algorithm has also become less and less savvy in terms of e.g. English/German translations. It used to be that the bot could sort of sense what you were trying to say and put it into different colloquialisms, which was even fun because it was like, “I know what you’re trying to say here, how about…” Now it’s in parts too stupid to translate the simplest sentences correctly, and the suggestions it makes are at times as moronic as those made by Google Translations.
If this is a deep-learning AI that learns from users’ translations and the phrases they choose most often – which, by the way, is a valuable, moneys worthwhile contribution of every free user to this project: They invest their time and texts, thereby providing the necessary data for the AI to do the thing as nicely as they brag about it in the first place – alas, the more unprofessional users discovered the translator, the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, the greater the aggregate of linguistically illiterate users has become, and the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, as it now learns the drivel of every Tom, Dick and Harry out there, which is why I now get their Mickey Mouse language as suggestions: the inane language of people who can barely spell the alphabet, it seems.
And as a thank you for our time and effort in helping them and their AI learn, they’ve lowered the limit from what was once 5,000 to now 1,500…? A big “fuck off” from here for that! Not a brass farthing from me for this attitude and behaviour, not in a hundred years.
When will you put an end to the mess in the comments?
Ghacks comments have been broken for too long. What article did you see this comment on? Reply below. If we get to 20 different articles we should all stop using the site in protest.
I posted this on [https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/] so please reply if you see it on a different article.
Comment redirected me to [https://www.ghacks.net/2012/08/04/add-search-the-internet-to-the-windows-start-menu/] which seems to be the ‘real’ article it is attached to
Comment redirected me to [https://www.ghacks.net/2012/08/04/add-search-the-internet-to-the-windows-start-menu/] which seems to be the ‘real’ article it is attached to
Article Title: Reddit enforces user activity tracking on site to push advertising revenue
Article URL: https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/
No surprises here. This is just the beginning really. I cannot see a valid reason as to why anyone would continue to use the platform anymore when there are enough alternatives fill that void.
I’m not sure if there is a point in commenting given that comments seem to appear under random posts now, but I’ll try… this comment is for https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/
My temporary “solution”, if you can call it that, is to use a VPN (Mullvad in my case) to sign up for and access Reddit via a European connection. I’m doing that with pretty much everything now, at least until the rest of the world catches up with GDPR. I don’t think GDPR is a magical privacy solution but it’s at least a first step.