Firefox local translation now supports Chinese/Japanese/Korean. Data is not sent to the server to protect user privacy.

The Mozilla Foundation announced that the local translation feature has begun supporting Chinese, Japanese, and Korean on desktop and Android versions. This update will help millions of users translate content without sending data to the cloud. The local translation function is an offline translation model developed by the Mozilla Foundation. When using this function, you need to download the translation model in advance. After downloading, the local model will be directly called to perform operations when translating content. Firefox browser will not collect the user's translation information.

The development team said that being able to support CJK characters such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean requires overcoming some technical challenges. The reason is that it is very difficult to efficiently run local translation models on devices with limited resources, especially Android devices.

There is also a technical reason that the early algorithm cannot handle the translation of these CJK characters, and the lack of open source data for training Chinese, Japanese, and Korean models also increases the difficulty of development. Therefore, the Firefox browser finally solved the problem by upgrading the machine learning algorithm and optimizing performance.

Now all users who upgrade to the latest version of Firefox (only desktop and Android versions, iOS version is not supported) can click the translation icon to perform translation operations. The Mozilla Foundation hopes to bring this secure and private translation function to more users.