Mozilla, the firm behind the popular web browser Firefox, released translation tools that do not rely on cloud processing to do their work.
“The ultimate goal of this consortium was to build a set of neural machine translation tools that would enable Mozilla to develop a website translation add-on that operates locally, i.e. the engines, language models and in-page translation algorithms would need to reside and be executed entirely in the user’s computer, so none of the data would be sent to the cloud, making it entirely private,” the company said in a blogpost.
In addition, Mozilla pointed out that another two novel features will be introduced.
The translation tools will allow users to input text in their own language that is dynamically translated on-the-fly to the page’s language.
“This set of requirements posed several technological challenges to the team: the translation engine was entirely written in programming languages that compile to native code,” the company noted.
“We needed a way to streamline the distribution of the project to avoid the overhead involved in providing builds compatible with all platforms supported by Firefox a” that would be impracticable to scale and maintain.”
Mozilla highlighted that its solution aims to develop a high-level API around the machine translation engine, port it to WebAssembly, and optimize the operations for matrix multiplication to run efficiently on CPUs.
“That enabled us to not only develop the translations add-on but also allowed every web page to integrate local machine translation, like in this website, which lets the user perform free-form translations without using the cloud,” the statement read.
Meanwhile, the translations add-on is available in the Firefox Add-On store for installation on Firefox Nightly, Beta and in General Release.
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