The company has also rolled out other features that are
aimed to make users’ experiences better.
“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 company said in a blogpost.
“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," it added.
In addition to that, two novel features needed to be
introduced.
The first is a translation of forms, to allow users to input
text in their own language that is dynamically translated on-the-fly to the
page’s language.
The second feature is a quality estimation of the
translations where low confidence translations should be automatically
highlighted on the page, to notify the user of potential errors.
“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 said.
“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.