bergamot-translator VS Waterfox

Interestingly, I think this is actually related to the offline translation features built into Firefox. Both are products of "Project Bergamot", but the Mozilla-maintained version was later merged into the Firefox application:

https://browser.mt/

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/local-translation-add-on...

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2022/06/training-efficient-neural-...

https://github.com/mozilla/firefox-translations

https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/toolkit/components/t...

Extra webpage with screenshot and links, impossible to search for normally:

https://translatelocally.com/downloads/

Does one thing and does it well.

Oh— For downloading models, it's much easier to pipe/`xargs` `translateLocally --available-models` into `translateLocally -d` than go through the GUI.

---

Other self-hostable translation tools:

https://www.apertium.org/index.eng.html

- Traditional rule-based translation. Seems to work pretty well, but no good desktop frontend.

https://www.argosopentech.com/

- Works, but crashy desktop app.

https://libretranslate.com/

- API wrapping Argos Translate.

https://lingva.thedaviddelta.com/

- Google Translate scraper/privacy frontend.

https://euroglot.com/

- Proprietary, subscription trialware.

It's possible with Neural Machine Translation models. Before being integrated into Firefox itself local translation was already available through the TranslateLocally add-on, see: https://browser.mt/

my understanding is this is using the same backend for the offline translator (aka Bergamot Project), it also supports online translation services (Google, DeepL, Bing, etc.)

Then you can run the OCR text through either a google, deepl, or one of the other commercial services to translate as a first pass. They all sell API access to the engines for bulk translation. Or you can use an open source engine like the new Bergamot Engine

It is running a full transformer type neural network on your cpu, it needs all the speed it can get.

It’s because the translation engine requires at least SSSE3.1 instructions[1]. These are translated to wasm SIMD instructions[2] which are only enabled by browsers if the underlying hardware is there to execute these at least somewhat efficient.

[1] https://github.com/browsermt/bergamot-translator/issues/418

[2] https://emscripten.org/docs/porting/simd.html

> But then you have to send your original comment to a translation company so there are privacy concerns there too.

There are modern offline translation systems available such as Project Bergamot https://browser.mt/

https://browser.mt/ ("Bergamot" was the technical name for the project.)

Already exists!

But it'd also be a good idea to check out https://translatelocally.com/ which is a UI for https://github.com/browsermt/bergamot-translator, used in Mozilla's offline MT browser extension. It's deep neural MT, but surpisingly undemanding (runs just fine on CPU's). Not yet in apt and such, but translatelocally at least has dpkg's and newest version should be usable from the CLI.

Consider Firefox translations, this is a completely offline machine translation extension based on this project.

> [Monday](https://github.com/WaterfoxCo/Waterfox/releases/tag/G5.1.9),

With 4GB of RAM I would recommend that you use the ESR version or some lightweight fork like Waterfox that I've been testing these days. Is really lighter and can use Firefox Sync. But it has his problems. I would prefer to go with ESR and deactivating smooth scrolling if I was you.

> I wish Unity didn't die

Hi from Unity on Ubuntu 23.04.

I am running the Unity flavour:

https://ubuntuunity.org/

It uses the latest Unity 7.7, released earlier this year:

https://gitlab.com/ubuntu-unity/unity-x/unityx

I run it on 3 or 4 machines, one of which has 2 screens and one of which has 3. Works great, scales well, handles modern Ubuntu just fine.

I use it with the Waterfox browser, which integrates natively with the Unity global menu bar, without any addons or config. I am currently on -- (hits alt-H, A) -- version 5.1.9.

https://www.waterfox.net/

Post issues on Gihtub for reporting bugs. https://github.com/WaterfoxCo/Waterfox/issues

I've made sure security updates have now been available ASAP for quite a while now. G5.1.9 released on Monday, for example. This is a day before Mozilla, but mostly because Mozilla spend a day or two doing QA.

I've been a fan of Waterfox for some time now

https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1201/extend-panel-men...

Of course, GNOME broke it in a later release. This is why no amount of extensions are an answer: they break. Extensions do not work from one release of GNOME to another, and when they fail, the whole desktop often fails.

> Also, it’s not really Gnome’s fault that linux doesn’t have as great metadata from apps to be able to display the apps’ menubars (unity could do it).

False. Gtk exposes this; Unity didn't have stored metadata on lots of apps, it just displayed the existing controls' contents somewhere else. If you run brand new Gtk apps on Unity today, they get panel menus. This was not some clever hack.

Unity is still around:

https://unityd.org/

The distro is back again:

https://ubuntuunity.org/

Brand new apps, like Waterfox, integrate with it fine although they did not exist when it was written.

https://www.waterfox.net/

> With all due respect, that is bullshit reasoning. Selectively displaying useful things is the whole point of UIs.

I disagree.

1. I want to choose what is shown or not. In order to choose, I have to be able to see it. In other words, it needs to be there at first, and then I can choose whether I want to show it or not.

If I can't see it in the first place, then how am I to know it's there?

It's the users' choice what is shown or not. It is not up to the developer to say "they don't need to see this and I'm going to hide it away."

Any piece of software that does that is user hostile.

> Otherwise why would you roll up your window?

Again: it's my choice. I get to choose. It's my computer. They are my windows. I choose if they are shown or not.

That is the point of free software: Choice.

GNOME says it's free, but it takes choices away from me. I object to that.

> Why do you have menus in the first place that hide their content until clicked?

To save space for my document. You can't show everything all the time: that is why you leave it up to the user to choose what they show and when.

(Incidentally, this is also why in my opinion the Microsoft ribbon based fluent interface fails. It tries to show far too much all at once, and the result is that it wastes a huge amount of screen space, and is actually more difficult to hunt through for what I need when I need it.)

> That is no longer the corner, so it doesn’t benefit from this law at all.

False.

Fitt's law is about target size.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law#Implications_for...

It is not about corners. It is about edges too.

By the way I do have a clue about this stuff... for example here is a screenshot of a piece of software which I designed about a dozen years which makes use of Fitt's Law.

https://twitter.com/SimplicityComps/status/54085863397497241...

> The super key is the same as the windows, or the mac command key.

So, yes, but those environments don't suddenly change your entire screen.

> Also often called Meta.

That is a different key. Meta and super are not interchangeable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_key

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_key_(keyboard_button)

> What’s the problem here exactly? Is alt+f4 written over the screen? Or ctrl+c? Especially that the same behavior is expected from the windows start menu.

The problem here, as I'm attempting to spell out, is that there were existing conventions for this stuff, and GNOME does not respect them.

> It’s a community for its users. You clearly don’t use it nor contribute to it either by work or financially, so it is not really fair to ask someone else to work for you specifically..

No. What I do is, I write about it for a living. I analyse this stuff, I draw comparisons, I point out weaknesses and strengths. That's my job.

In my professional capacity, the GNOME foundation invited me to its GUADEC conference about six or seven years back. I asked a lot of awkward and difficult questions, because that's my job, and I didn't get invited back.

> Literally every OS and distro suck at it.

False. For example, using most other interfaces, such as XFCE, I can treat a multiscreen desktop as one big space. I can have one panel at the far left, and one on the far right, of the entire multi-monitor desktop.

But GNOME doesn't let me do that.

Why not?

> Nonetheless, I feel you are reasoning from a very biased point

Because I disagree with you, you think that I'm biased?

Do you think that everyone who disagrees with you is biased?

Have you considered that perhaps I have opinions, and can draw upon years of knowledge and experience, and make reasoned arguments based on evidence, and that is not the same thing as being biased?

> I don’t think it is as fruitful a discussion.

So because I can counter your arguments with examples and reasoning, you don't think that it's fruitful discussion?

Personally, I think that the arguments where people can defend their points, and produce evidence to back them up, are the most fruitful kind.