Comment by closewith
19 days ago
7 languages and a feature nobody to a rounding error uses? No, I don't consider that to be a research, economic, or technical success.
Honestly, I'm not sure if you posted this is support of Horizon or against? The Horizon budget for 2021-2027 is €95.5 billion or ~€15 billion per annum. If a headline "success" is an unfinished implementation of translation in Firefox of a translation engine (Marian) built by the Microsoft Translator team, then it's safe to say Horizon is an unqualified failure.
I don't have the numbers at hand or know if they're even public somewhere, but telemetry shows that Firefox Translations is used a lot. Definitely on the list of successful new Firefox features.
(I'm a Mozilla employee, but I have not worked on Firefox Translations.)
>I don't have the numbers at hand
Is this it?
https://glam.telemetry.mozilla.org/fog/probe/translations_re...*
Hmm, I'm not sure, but I'm not sure how to read that page either. That graph has a lot more variability than I'd expect though.
What is a lot?
Before integration, it had ~490 users as an extension, vs ~800,000 for To Google Translate, the number one option.
Offline translation has to be manually enabled per language in Settings.
Frankly I don't believe there's any meaningful usage until I see the numbers.
>enabled per language in Settings.
Do they? I tried opening a French government site[1] and received the Firefox pop-up offering to translate the page. I did not have to enable anything in settings neither is the French language model downloaded. It seems translations are enabled by default.
[1]: https://www.elysee.fr/
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I believe to the order of millions of translations per day, but again, I don't remember where to view this, so might not be correct. But it's definitely orders of magnitude larger than 100s of users.
(And indeed, as a sibling comment points out, the feature is suggested to users in context, which of course massively helps with discoverability, so it's no surprise to me that it's used way more often than the extension.)
Can you, please, share a source for the claims you make about Marian? Specifically, "developed and open-sourced by a US multinational, Microsoft" and "funded by MS" (from two other comments by you)?
It does look like Microsoft is (was) funding the project, and employs one of the authors as head of research at Microsoft Translator, which is great, but all the "seed" funding and actual research happened in EU. Microsoft hired the author only in 2018 [1], while the earliest EU grant was allocated in 2015 [2], and the main paper they published says "it has mainly been developed at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan and at the University of Edinburgh" [3].
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/in/junczys/
[2] https://github.com/marian-nmt/marian#acknowledgements
[3] https://aclanthology.org/P18-4020.pdf
Where did you get 7 languages from? It's like 30 right now, with new ones being added regularly.
What's unfinished about it?
And Marian also received 6 grants via Horizon, in cooperation with the exact same universities (the one in Edinburgh being the main one), so I'm not sure what's your point?
And did I try to list every success or one tangible example, as the parent asked?
> Where did you get 7 languages from?
The Horizon/Bergamot project ended with seven languages. Anything thereafter was added separately.
> What's unfinished about it?
The project ended with an unfinished implementation.
> And Marian was also funded by Horizon, also in cooperation with the exact same universities, so I'm not sure what's your point?
No, Marian was funded by MS.
You are revising history extraordinarily to make the most unimpressive project appear better than it was. If Bergamot achieved all its goals and was the exemplar of Horizon, Horizon would be a complete failure.
As it was, the project limped over the line unfinished to be picked up by Mozilla.
Huh? Most Firefox users presumably use it, and anyway it's obviously essential and extremely useful functionality.
And the really important languages for EU/US audiences are, in order, English, Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, Portuguese, German, Italian, which is, guess what, 7 languages...
> Huh? Most Firefox users presumably use it, and anyway it's obviously essential and extremely useful functionality.
~~Only Firefox users who explicitly enable offline translation per langauge in Settings use this feature~~, which will be a tiny minority of users in a browser with a tiny (~2.5%) market share.
I'm wrong, the language packs now auto-download.
> And the really important languages for EU/US audiences are, in order, English, Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, Portuguese, German, Italian, which is, guess what, 7 languages...
Well, those weren't the seven languages supported by the Bergamot project when it ended. Only two of your seven were supported: Bulgarian, Czech, English, Estonian, French, Polish, and Spanish.