I was browsing when I came across a firefox plugin that allow the offline translation.
The extension seems to be 5 mb (I don’t know if it downloads some module in the background).
It seems to be based on another project based on the opensource engine of microsoft translator.
I set the translation offline and I’m using it, it looks like it works even if it seems incredible to me, the translations are good and it’s incredibly fast to the point that it seems quite strange to me.
Can be a bit crazy but if they have really implemented for firefox, maybe it would be possible to implement the translation of messages in DC like telegram but offline.
It would also be a great ad for DC, how many other chats have this feature? could be promoted to create communities without language barriers.
Edit: yes, it really work offline, I did a quick test by disconnecting the PC, the translations continue to work!
LLMs do actually have some impressive abilities if you ignore the hype about them being human substitutes. They work better on closely-related languages and often make wild errors with perfect grammar, which are hard to detect unless you know both languages. Still useful. Might make a good WebXDC app.
True, translations are not perfect, but in the end mistakes are often easily correctables and often irrelevant, sometimes isre only a matter of form.
I tried to open the file of the extension and in an internal directory there are the engine files, one wasm and two js.
I tried to read a little more about it and it seems to me that it is optimized for firefox and that models are provided for languages.
Anyway, yes a webxdc would be very appropriate, I only see some problems:
I think there is a size limit and I don’t know how much it is
I don’t know if webxdc interaction is sufficient (I know that applications can write in the chat, but can also read it to get the messages to be translated?)
It would be nice to be able to use the translator even without having to open the application, in a more fluent way
The “Ruffle” Flash player emulator app says it’s 4.8mb.
The “Live chat” app allows in-app chats.
See 2.
I see this as more useful for sending out a message translated into multiple languages I speak, which should maybe be collapsed by default. Collaborative translation into further languages, supervised by my contacts that speak both, would be useful, especially in broadcast lists. I would not want to send out stuff I could not read in my own name. It would translate perfectly well almost all the time, and therein the problem…
Ah I wasn’t thinking that it could just be inserted alltogether with the chat on an app, I thought to use it directly in the DC principal window, but undoubtedly in this other way it would be useful
I have never had the pleasure of trying the broadcast lists, however I consider it a more useful feature than it seems, makes it possible in DC to create a unilateral communication that suits news channel, in this way DC can also be used in certain public circumstances even if there is no moderation in groups.
I think we’ve imagined two apps between us; a live chat that translates as you go, and a something more like the E-mail Composer app to manage multilanguage mailing lists.
If you sent each language as a separate message, with “[en]” or “[de]” or whatever appended to the subject, they’d be easy to filter.
Oh, much bigger, that is disappointing. Thank you for checking. I’m sorry.
Even more useful than translations would be voice transcription; it would vastly improve e-mail accessibilty for those with vision and fine motor control problems.
That said, bigger isn’t always better, and I’d think a specific people-talking-to-phones training dataset might create a smaller, more specialized model than ingesting Youtube.
for the record, there is an app in fdroid for offline translations it uses exactly the same models from FireFox/Mozilla but extracted to a GoogleTranslator-like app, in their latest version the changelog says “Implement API so other apps can request for translation” I think that is the right approach, having some translations app system-wide where you download the models and then other apps can integrate with it and request translations
I doubt if we add this to delta chat it will have big impact since Firefox/Mozilla translations models offer poor translation quality and people requiring to install the extra app is an extra step fewer will do
