New in Firefox 118: Private Local, Browser-Based Website Translating

An anonymous reader shared this report from Liliputing.com: Web browsers have had tools that let you translate websites for years. But they typically rely on cloud-based translation services like Google Translate or Microsoft's Bing Translator. The latest version of Mozilla's Firefox web browser does things differently. Firefox 118 brings support for Fullpage Translation, which can translate websites entirely in your browser. In other words, everything happens locally on your computer without any data sent to Microsoft, Google, or other companies.

Here's how it works. Firefox will notice when you visit a website in a supported language that's different from your default language, and a translate icon will show up in the address bar. Tap that icon and you'll see a pop-up window that asks what languages you'd like to translate from and to. If the browser doesn't automatically detect the language of the website you're visiting, you can set these manually... You can also tap the settings icon in the translation menu and choose to "always translate" or "never translate" a specific language so that you won't have to manually invoke the translation every time you visit sites in that language.
Firefox is support nine languages so far.

E2E

[backslashdot]

Firefox is support nine languages so far.

Can it translate English to English?

Re:

[test321]

I tried "E2E" through a pivot: English -> Persian (or French or German) -> English. The result is nearly identical to the original text. In the first sentence it writes "years to come" (which is wrong in the context), in the second sentence "usually" instead of "typically", and it writes "full page" instead of "Fullpage". Note I used the add-on based on the translation same engine, which enables quick translate by copy-paste.

Re:

[backslashdot]

That’s a valid test only if you know that the Persian version was a good translation.

Seems good

[OrangeTide]

I appreciate you can configure some languages as "never translate". From the article's description I was worried there was only one default language. Some people know more than one language, and would prefer to read it even if they are not fluent than to suffer a machine translation.

But can it be done well locally?

[Flavianoep]

Isn't machine translation a resource intensive task? Can it be done with consumer grade hardware?

Re:

[John.Banister]

All those little handheld translators are consumer grade hardware. It's going to depend on how this software compares.

Re:But can it be done well locally?

[vyvepe]

The language models for translation in Firefox are small. Installation size of one language pair is only about 40 MB. The translation speed is about 870 wps on 3.1 GHz quad core i7.

Re:

[byronivs]

Thanks for the information. Anything not google starts with points.

to disable

[hjf]

enter about:config

search for browser.translations.enable

and change to false, to get rid of this crap

Re:

[kmoser]

That won't uninstall it, it will just disable it. Can I choose to uninstall this feature I didn't ask for and will never want? Better yet, can it ask whether you want this during the install process, so I don't have to waste time and disk space installing and then uninstalling it?