Enhance the new "translate selection"

[Wyzo]

It's an option I was looking for a very, very long time, so I was very happy to this see this thing pop up in the news.

Unfortunately it doesn't work for me and would need several changes to be efficient.

For context I'm a longtime French firefox user and I constantly need to quickly translate english words or 2-3 words expressions. I have a good level in English, but not perfect especially for advanced words. I never found a solution suitable for this need in the various add-ons, I just guess there is not so much demand for this. Some years ago I finally found a half-decent solution: CTRL + C on the word, CTRL + T, "tr" (the shortcut i gave for google translate search engine) and CTRL + V. I do this probably between 5 and 30 times a day.

So was very happy I'm just 2 click away from my translation, unfortunately that doesn't really work for me and I see a lot of room for improvement:
- It only propose me "translate Selection to English", though I want to translate it to French 😞 So unusable for me. I guess it's because I put English for UI and preferred language. It should be configurable. As an IT tech it's a no-go to fetch the french webpages first.
- An absolute must would be to have the word (or short sentence) translated directly into the context menu (like in a sub-menu), then if you click on the translated content you open the current translation windows with more options.
- Another absolute must: for words or short expression, give not only one translation but at least the 2 or 3 most relevant/frequent translations, the reality is that when you use translation for single words and not for entire webpages, there's rarely only one good answer.

Hope you continue to work on this and a lot of users adopt it 🙂

[nordzilla]

Hey @Wyzo,

I was the lead software developer on this project, and I really appreciate your feedback and engagement here.

- "It only propose me "translate Selection to English", though I want to translate it to French 😞 So unusable for me. I guess it's because I put English for UI and preferred language. It should be configurable. As an IT tech it's a no-go to fetch the french webpages first."🙂

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Currently, the language that is offered as a translation target adheres primarily to what you have listed in your preferred web content languages in the Firefox settings. This is a decision that was made when we implemented the initial full-page translation feature for Firefox Desktop.

I am actively working on changes that will allow Firefox to retain the most recently translated target language (Bug 1866827). This means that Firefox will act as it currently does prior to your first-ever translation request, but if you, for example, change the target language to French in one of the Translations panels, then that will be the language that is offered to you as a target the next time you engage with a Translations feature. 

There is a bit more work to do to ensure that everything is updated correctly between both the full-page translations feature as well as the select translations feature when the user has multiple windows and tabs open in various different states.

Once this functionality is complete, I expect that it will improve your experience with the Select Translations feature in particular.

- "Another absolute must: for words or short expression, give not only one translation but at least the 2 or 3 most relevant/frequent translations, the reality is that when you use translation for single words and not for entire webpages, there's rarely only one good answer.🙂"

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You're certainly right that there is very often more than one correct translation, especially for shorter texts. We are considering, as a team, ways that we may be able to approach this kind of functionality, and how to make determinations about when/how alternative translations are offered.

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"Some years ago I finally found a half-decent solution: CTRL + C on the word, CTRL + T, "tr" (the shortcut i gave for google translate search engine) and CTRL + V. I do this probably between 5 and 30 times a day.

- An absolute must would be to have the word (or short sentence) translated directly into the context menu (like in a sub-menu), then if you click on the translated content you open the current translation windows with more options."

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It may not be possible to show the translated content directly in the context menu as described, since there are many considerations around performance and error handling in a shared feature space that I think would make it difficult to justify adding this functionality to the context menu itself; however, we are actively considering workflows in which users frequently copy and paste text into translators. I don't have anything specific to share just yet, but I hope that we will be able to solve your use case in time!

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"Hope you continue to work on this and a lot of users adopt it 🙂"

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We care a lot about providing a good translation experience for our users. Your feedback here is much appreciated, and helps us guide future decisions. I appreciate your time and support!

[Wyzo]

Thanks a lot for your answer and all your work, if all goes as you described I will surely be satisfied 🙂

I thinks it's the kind of feature that, if not perfectly targeted will go un-notifed to most users and at some point will be deprecated, so here's why I did a feedback, and also because I hope Mozilla can continue to offer a top-notch state-of-the art browser to compete against big tech.

[ffffff]

Thank you so much for all your work, and this detailed answer! Big kudos to the entire team, really. An offline translation feature bundled into the browser is one of the nicest ideas I've seen in directly user-facing browser innovation recently.

Definitely will be keeping an eye on 1866827. About the possibility of multiple translations, I think some kind of solution here will be especially useful as the work on languages like Japanese progresses, due to the sheer information density in certain characters, though you probably considered this already.