To clarify, AFAIK, every single translation app/tool that exists so far, works by sending your text (or audio) to 3rd-party servers to translate it there (and roughly 99% of the time, also scrape...
To clarify, AFAIK, every single translation app/tool that exists so far, works by sending your text (or audio) to 3rd-party servers to translate it there (and roughly 99% of the time, also scrape whatever personal data they can possibly get out of your message), and then send back the translation to your screen.
This FF add-on runs locally, on your device, never sends your "before" or "after" translated messages to anyone, anywhere. At least, that's how I understand it.
It's still new, a bit "beta", only works for a dozen-ish languages ... but it's a huge step in the right direction. As a developer, I can tell you that writing a high quality translation app, that works to-and-from dozens of different languages, all locally with all the necessary language and AI resources on-hand ... that is just an effin' hard, hard challenge ... so I understand why everything until now defers to remote servers.
Side-note: I was very disappointed to discover that the Bergamot project's website, browser.mt does not work at all without allowing it to use various external Google libraries (like ajax.google.com, gstatic, etc), and the Contact form did not work in FF, even with my ad blockers completely disabled. I literally had to use Vivaldi to send them a note to complain about the Google usage. And then, insult to injury, I had to complete a Google recaptcha before the form submitted.
There are already several open source machine translation frameworks and trained models, but perhaps not in a convenient app or plugin. https://machinetranslate.org/building/libraries-frameworks/
There are already several open source machine translation frameworks and trained models, but perhaps not in a convenient app or plugin.
To clarify, AFAIK, every single translation app/tool that exists so far, works by sending your text (or audio) to 3rd-party servers to translate it there (and roughly 99% of the time, also scrape whatever personal data they can possibly get out of your message), and then send back the translation to your screen.
This FF add-on runs locally, on your device, never sends your "before" or "after" translated messages to anyone, anywhere. At least, that's how I understand it.
It's still new, a bit "beta", only works for a dozen-ish languages ... but it's a huge step in the right direction. As a developer, I can tell you that writing a high quality translation app, that works to-and-from dozens of different languages, all locally with all the necessary language and AI resources on-hand ... that is just an effin' hard, hard challenge ... so I understand why everything until now defers to remote servers.
Side-note: I was very disappointed to discover that the Bergamot project's website, browser.mt does not work at all without allowing it to use various external Google libraries (like ajax.google.com, gstatic, etc), and the Contact form did not work in FF, even with my ad blockers completely disabled. I literally had to use Vivaldi to send them a note to complain about the Google usage. And then, insult to injury, I had to complete a Google recaptcha before the form submitted.
There are already several open source machine translation frameworks and trained models, but perhaps not in a convenient app or plugin.
https://machinetranslate.org/building/libraries-frameworks/