I just recommended someone to use Firefox for its excellent translation capability. And I think my reply warrants an entire post, so here is a copy of my reply. This is just a reminder that you can visit websites with other languages too. However Japanese and Korean are not supported yet, which would be helpful for me. Hopefully they add the support soon. But for German in example it works:

You could use a translation tool, for something that looks interesting to you. At least Firefox makes this easy, with its builtin translation functionality (without Google as far as I understand, and I think local/offline only, but can be wrong). Firefox is my main way to interact with Lemmy:

Directly in the addressbar for non native languages:

Or through menu:

BTW I just saw the link that describes it: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/website-translation

Note: Unlike other browsers that rely on cloud services, Firefox keeps your data safe on your device. There’s no privacy risk of sending text to third parties for analysis because translation happens on your device, not externally.

One more reason to use Firefox.

Edit: User Lazycog in the comments pointed out that you can also open a new tab for free text translations. Type about:translations in the addressbar and you get this:

Edit: Another user Arthur Besse in the comments pointed out that you can translate current selection only too. And you need to install language packs, so those will be available offline too. Otherwise its online connected I assume.

Select text and right click, so you can translate that part only:

Go to Firefox General Settings page, scroll down to Translations section and download the packages you need. Also checkout what its own settings has to offer, for some customization:

  • thingsiplay@beehaw.orgOP
    3·
    2 days ago

    Mhm, I cannot find details about this too. Maybe Firefox itself has a language identifier for offline check, and if it thinks its in “Bulgarian”, then it will download the partial pack. Because Firefox must have such an identifier, otherwise how would it know what language to translate into? It is even capable of knowing its “Japanese” or “Korean” language, which are not even supported.

    • Arthur BesseA
      2·
      1 day ago

      Yeah, that would make sense - language detection is trivial and can be done with a small statistical model; nothing as complicated as a neural network is needed, i think just looking at bigram frequency is accurate enough when you have more than a few words.

      If that is what is happening, and it is only leaking the language pair to the server the first time that pair is needed, that would be nice… I wish they made it clear if that is what is happening 😢