The Firefox browser now has a built-in page translator that works even without the Internet::Mozilla has announced the release of an update to its Firefox browser. In version number 118, users will find a significant innovation - a built-in translator

  • Marius@lemmy.mariusdavid.fr
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    9 months ago

    I’ve been using for a few months. Here is my opinion:

    • Translation quality is still far from good, but is good enought to be understandable.
    • Can’t translate PDF files (hope it could do it in the future, even if that mean reflowing it)
    • The extension allowed to keep translating this tab. That’s a future that, in my opinion, would be highly appreciated in the built-in translator (instead of enabling the “always translate”).
    • The language choice doesn’t correspond with what I usually need (which is chinese. But I know chinese is notably hard to translate.)
    • It seems that translation into french first goes thought a first pass of english translation. While this still produce readable result, targeting english is for now probably the best option (even thought the cost of implementing a new language translation pair doesn’t seems too high, I understand they might prioritise adding more language, at least for now. Actually, I should probably contribute to this myself if I care as much about it)
    • stevedidWHAT@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Very interesting points, does OCR work with PDF? Might be a possible temporary work around to run the pdf through ocr and pipe back into Firefox (maybe by running it on a local version of the .html and just directly injecting the pdf back in? Not sure, could be a fun project!

      • Marius@lemmy.mariusdavid.fr
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        9 months ago

        Well… I once tried to just copy the pdf into a .txt file that I then opened into firefox, but it seems to not translate .txt, thought it may be cause they are not HTML.