Mozilla introduces offline machine translation tools to make user's life easy

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Mozilla, the parent company for Firefox, a popular web browser has added translation tools to Firefox. The new tool does not rely on cloud processing to do its work and hence, it works offline.

The company has further added a number of features which could be aimed at making users' experiences better.

In the company’s blog, it was stated: "In January of 2019, Mozilla joined the University of Edinburgh, Charles University, University of Sheffield and University of Tartu as part of a project funded by the European Union called Project Bergamot.”

The blog further states: "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 new update has further added two novel features:

1. A translation of forms- This feature enables the user to input text in their own language which is dynamically translated on-the-fly to the page's language.
2. Quality estimation of the translations- this feature works where low confidence translations have to be highlighted on the page. This feature helps the user to notify the user of potential errors.
3. 

The company said: "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." 

"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," it added.

Mozilla said that its solution to that was 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 company said.

The translations add-on is now available in the Firefox Add-On store for installation on Firefox Nightly, Beta and in General Release.

(Inputs from IANS)