Mozilla has introduced a new add-on (its version of extensions) called Firefox Translations. As the name suggests, this is meant for translations but the good part is that it’s done offline. The translation tool works locally and doesn’t rely on the cloud. Here are the details.
Firefox Translations is a part of the EU’s Project Bergamot, which involves the University of Edinburgh, the Charles University, the University of Sheffield, and the University of Tartu. This plugin is based on neural machine translation tools, which use a person’s computer to translate the required input instead of sending the data to data centers outside.
This makes the whole process private and secure and doesn’t allow third-party data centers from accessing the content to translate, which can be important and private at times.
Firefox Translations currently supports only 12 languages, namely, Spanish, Bulgarian, Czech, Estonian, German, Icelandic, Italian, Norwegian Bokmal and Nynorsk, Persian, Portuguese, and Russian. This can be a drawback and compared to Google Translate, is quite less.
