Firefox Translations: support for French, Polish and Ukrainian languages added
Mozilla released an update for Firefox Translations that is adding support for French, Polish and Ukrainian translations to the browser add-on for Firefox.
Firefox Translations is Mozilla's answers to Google Translate, Microsoft Translate, and other translation services. Unlike the aforementioned services, Firefox Translate is designed to work offline to improve user privacy and some other use cases.
Mozilla started to integrate Firefox Translations in May 2021 in Firefox. Back then, it was an experimental add-on that supported just a few languages. In May 2022, Mozilla pushed out a new version of Firefox Translations that extended language support to additional languages and improved integration in the Firefox web browser.
The most recent Firefox Translations update, released on July 22, 2022, introduces support for French, Polish and Ukrainian translations. The integration works exactly like that of other languages. When you visit a foreign language page, Firefox Translations displays its toolbar on the page. A language file is downloaded to the system when the translate button is selected; this happens once for each of the supported languages, but only if the language is required.
A click on the Firefox Translations icon in the address bar of the browser toggles the translate toolbar on the page. The toolbar includes options to never translate content on a particular site, to never translate a language, to enable the translations of forms, and to select a source language manually from the list of available languages.
The new Firefox Translations release, version 1.1.3, includes several improvements and changes besides that. Language detection is improved in the new release, as the extension checks the page's markup as well now to take information into account when determining the language of a webpage.
Other changes include a new high resolution icon, making the user interface responsive to address display issues, and improvements to in-page translations.
Some users may experience issues with the newly added languages. They may not appear in the "this page is in" dropdown box and there may be no "never translate language" option available. Translations do work by simply activating the translate button, and Mozilla is already working on a fix.
Closing Words
Firefox Translations is making progress. While it has a long way to go before support for the majority of languages is added, it is improving with every release.
Now You: do you use Firefox Translations?
Thai language not supported :(
It is coming, question is when. Language support and not being integrated natively in Firefox is what is holding Firefox Translations back. Maybe Mozilla should give the extension a big push by spending more engineers hours on the extension to get a hundred or so languages supported.
It would be interesting to know what is taking so long regarding language support.
> It would be interesting to know what is taking so long regarding language support.
The translation work to “native language” in this project is carried out by free contributors whose native language as native language.
Contributors are well-meaning volunteers who have the desire to “take responsibility for translation.”
Since the workload of the offline translation program is enormous, the burden on the contributor is heavy, and it is a very difficult task.
So, this case is explained in the following:
Missing enhancements and languages! · Issue #253 · mozilla/firefox-translations · GitHub
https://github.com/mozilla/firefox-translations/issues/253
> Also there is no Turkish language support, hopefully it’ll be in future.
Reply:
we have a very comprehensive tutorial on how to train models for new languages here: https://github.com/mozilla/firefox-translations-training
andrenatal (Applied machine learning leader @ Mozilla)
About this extension:
Firefox Translations was developed with The Bergamot Project Consortium, coordinated by the University of Edinburgh with partners Charles University in Prague, the University of Sheffield, University of Tartu, and Mozilla. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 825303.
A CPU that supports SSE4.1 extensions is required for this addon to function properly. If it doesn’t, and error will be displayed when the translation is being started.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/firefox-translations/
There goes the only remaining reason to use Chrome. Thank you FF!
Support for Russian translations dropped?
Why should it be dropped?
@Paul: i did not say it should be dropped, I merely asked the question ;-)
Still listed as under development.