Due to its popularity, there is a high chance that you will always rush to Google Translate in case you want any translation done over the internet. And the incorporation of the feature in browsers made it even better for us to embrace. Now, Mozilla is working on integrating a similar, privacy-focused, feature for Firefox users to read pages in different languages without spending any extra data.
Beragmot is the project name of this feature.
The key point to note here is, Firefox’s page translation feature is different from the one supported in Google Chrome. It does not rely on cloud-based text translation services such as Google Translate, Bing Translator, or Yandex.Translate, but rather uses a client-side, machine learning-based translation library.
Unlike the other services which send the data to the cloud, the tool will perform its translation locally.
As of today, if you want any page translation in Firefox, you need to install a third-party add on. But the future should be bright as Mozilla is currently working on integrating the new translation engine into the main site. It is just not yet clear when the feature will be rolled into the main Firefox browser, but several reports indicate Mozilla is hiring neural machine translation engineers to help with the integration.
Page Translation Feature in Firefox
Firefox already ships with a user interface (UI) to support a page translation feature. This interface was added a couple of years back when Mozilla first wanted to add a page translation feature to compete with Google Chrome. Upon realizing that the feature would incur massive financial costs to the company, it was trashed.
However, the UI was left inside Firefox, even though the API keys for the various translation services were never added.
Users can enable this UI by going to the about:config options page, and enabling the browser.translation.ui.show and browser.translation.detectLanguage settings. Firefox Nightly users can enable these two options to see how work on Bergamot advances.
