Re:Firefox is getting language translation
by azepoi on Tuesday October 22, 2019 @09:42AM
(#21323479)
The European Union, the Swiss confederation, Belgium, Canada and other multilingual states, the European patent office and many international organization provide a huge corpus of professionally translated documents and reports for major European languages. Not so much for Japanese.
The bigger problem is likely to be lack of training data. Unless they have a pile of cash to pay professional translators to produce a parallel corpus, the alternative is to scrape translations from the internet. Basically, crawl the same site multiple times with different Accept-Language headers and try to align the results. Crucially, this depends on an existing ecosystem of bilingual websites with high-quality human translations.
According to DeepL's website they're a spin-off of Linguee, who provide a search service for exactly that kind of parallel data. So before DeepL starts supporting any given language pair, you should expect it to appear in Linguee first. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguee
Edit: It took me a while to figure out how to select a different language on https://linguee.com (Their UI seems broken using mobile Firefox Preview.) Appending /english-chinese and /english-japanese to the URL shows that they already support those two, and the alignment of translations appears reasonable to me. No /english-arabic, though.