Mozilla has announced an extension that allows you to translate web pages locally.
Firefox Translations — a translation add-on that doesn’t rely on cloud processing to do its job, as is the case with the translators offered by Google and Microsoft. Instead, Firefox Translations utilizes the machine learning-based process right on your own computer to translate — thus guaranteeing maximum privacy.
The translator’s code, language templates and algorithms are stored on your computer, so no data is sent to the cloud. Typically, this kind of work is done by GPU clusters in data centers, where large language models — gigabytes in size and with billions of parameters — would be deployed to translate a user’s query.
It is the result of the EU-funded Bergamot Project, in which Mozilla collaborated with several universities on a set of machine learning tools that would make offline translation possible.
