Browser-based Multilingual Translation

Informations projet

Bergamot

N° de convention de subvention: 825303

DOI

10.3030/825303

Projet clôturé

Date de signature de la CE 12 Novembre 2018

Date de début 1 Janvier 2019

Date de fin 30 Juin 2022

Financé au titre de

• INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Leadership in enabling and industrial technologies - Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)

Coût total

€ 2 999 096,25

Contribution de l’UE

€ 2 999 096,25

Coordonné par

THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH
United Kingdom

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - Bergamot (Browser-based Multilingual Translation)

Période du rapport: 2020-07-01 au 2022-06-30

Résumé du contexte et des objectifs généraux du projet

Machine translation, such as from French to English, is commonly used in travel, e-commerce, government, and to support Ukrainian refugees. Typically text is sent the cloud for translation but this endangers user privacy. In a business or government context, cloud translation may be banned to protect confidentiality. Our machine translation system runs locally, preserving privacy and removing the risk of disclosure. Moreover, it does not require Internet access.

Running locally requires speed to run on desktop CPUs, low memory consumption, and small download sizes. The experience should be integrated with a desktop application and in the browser. A Firefox extension translates web pages locally. Going beyond simply translating pages, an assistant will help users fill out forms that expect responses in another language. The system should also estimate its own confidence and display it to users, warning of potentially incorrect translations.

Travail effectué depuis le début du projet jusqu’à la fin de la période considérée dans le rapport et principaux résultats atteints jusqu’à présent

The project has a Firefox extension with 34,000 users that translates locally and a desktop application at https://translatelocally.com. The applications support translation for Bulgarian, Czech, English, Estonian, French, Polish, and Spanish. On a range of consumer laptops and desktops dating from 2012 to 2019, the desktop application translates 1000-9000 words per second.

An assistant supports filling forms where users can type in their own language and translations are entered as responses. Users can tick a box "highlight potential errors in red" to see where translation may be lower quality according to the system's self-assessment.

Our project featured in over 100 news articles including TechCrunch, Yahoo News, making #1 on Hacker News twice.

Progrès au-delà de l’état des connaissances et impact potentiel prévu (y compris l’impact socio-économique et les conséquences sociétales plus larges du projet jusqu’à présent)

Free local translation preserves privacy and empowers users who work with sensitive data. Extending Firefox means the project will be widely available. Open source enables extension and the possibility for the community to contribute translation models for underserved languages. The form filling assistant enables users to respond in languages they do not speak, going beyond ordinary web translation.

Our project has pushed boundaries of efficient neural network models, making them faster or supporting larger models on consumer devices. These methods have implications the speed and quality of other systems like captioning and summarization.

Estimating the system's own quality ensures trust in algorithms, a rising societal issue, is placed more appropriately. Moreover, it requires less labeling, so the technology can be applied more widely for languages with less data available.

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