University of Tartu researchers are developing a translation programme with Mozilla Firefox

Recently, news of Mozilla’s new translation programme Bergamot spread through international technology news portals. Few know that the high-level team also includes language technologists from the University of Tartu who are helping to improve the flexibility and quality of machine translation. The head of the Tartu part of this work, professor of natural language processing at the Institute of Computer Science Mark Fišel, describes the background of the collaboration.

Reading about the project from English media, you will learn that it involves a machine translation programme (The Bergamot Project; see browser.mt) for open-source web browsers, such as Mozilla Firefox, the largest difference with, e.g., Google Translation being its privacy. When most similar machine translation programmes are cloud-based, Bergamot must be downloaded to the computer and no user data is collected during its use.

In addition to the University of Tartu and Mozilla, the consortium of Bergamot also includes the University of Edinburgh, Charles University and the University of Sheffield.

Read futher from research in Estonia webpage.

The translation of this article from Estonian Public Broadcasting science news portal Novaator was funded by the European Regional Development Fund through Estonian Research Council.