Official Firefox Translations add-on now available, bringing offline translation support to Firefox

Firefox now has an official offline translation solution available via an add-on.

The tool, named Firefox Translations, uses a machine learning-based process that works using your computer's local resources in order to provide translations of web pages or documents you're using the Firefox web browser to view. Though it requires an initial download of language resources in order to function at the start, it uses artificial intelligence machine learning to improve as it translates instead of requiring an Internet connection in order to link up to an external server for the translation work to be processed.

The use of offline translation in our modern, hyperconnected world works to strengthen the use of local computer resources that can't be used for data harvesting or privacy violation. It's then no surprise that Firefox Translations was made possible by the European Union funded Project Bergamot. The project oversaw a collaboration between the Mozilla Foundation and various universities that focused on developing the machine learning tools that enable offline translation.

Firefox Translations works as a privacy friendly alternative to the likes of DeepL, Google Translate, and Bing Translate. It is freely available and can be installed from the official add-ons from Firefox page.

Further coverage: TechCrunch