Mozilla Firefox Gets Free Offline Language Translation

Mozilla has released a brand new language-translation tool for Firefox. It does not rely on cloud processing and instead runs the machine learning-based processes on your local computer.

It’s a major step forward for a popular service that’s heavily influenced by companies like Google and Microsoft. Firefox Translations, a translation tool, may be downloaded and installed on your browser.

How will the Firefox translation work?

According to Mozilla Firefox will need to download certain resources the first time it does the translation of a language, and it will probably need to download improved models if necessary. But the main translation work is done by your computer; not in a data center hundreds of miles away.

Firefox translation’s entire process is maintained localized, the data that is or will be translated remains completely private; and will not be transferred to the cloud. This gives it an advantage over Google, which offers the Cloud Translation API service to users.

However, Google has stated that it does not make the content of text messages sent by users available to the public nor does it share the content with any third parties.

Although Google and Microsoft’s cloud-based technologies are accurate and speedy, sending your data to a third party poses a serious privacy and security risk. Some people are willing to take this risk. However, others would rather not work with online advertising behemoths if they don’t have to.

Firefox Translations will allow users to input the text in their own language. The browser will hence translate it on-the-fly to the preferred language. Firefox Translations currently supports 12 languages; Spanish, Bulgarian, Czech, Estonian, German, Icelandic, Italian, Norwegian Bokmal and Nynorsk, Persian, Portuguese and Russian.

If you are a Mozilla Firefox user, you do not have to wait to get your hands on it and start the translations right away. Mozilla is making the translation add-on available to its users; you can get it from the Firefox Add-On store to install it on Firefox Nightly, Beta, and in General Release.