Mozilla just made a translation plugin for the Firefox browser that will work offline. The new plug-in is called Firefox translations and will need to download some files the first time you convert any kind of text. Mozilla has tried a different approach, very different than what every other company is doing as this new translation plugin will use your system resources to handle the translation instead of sending it to a data center for cloud processing.

This plugin has emerged as a result of the company’s work with the EU-funded “Project Bergamot”. Other organizations involved include the University of Edinburgh, Charles University, University of Sheffield, and the University of Tartu. The goal of this project was to develop neural machine tools, helping Mozilla create an offline translation option. Mozilla went on to say, “The engines, language models, and in-page translation algorithms would need to reside and be executed entirely in the user’s computer, so none of the data would be sent to the cloud, making it entirely private,”

One of the biggest limitations of this plug-in right now is that it can only handle up to 12 other languages between English. Currently, Firefox translations support Spanish, Bulgarian, Czech, Estonian, German, Icelandic, Italian, Norwegian Bokmal and Nynorsk, Persian, Portuguese and Russian.

Mozilla and their partners on this project have created a training pipeline through which volunteers can assist by helping train new models so more languages can be added to it. Currently, this plugin does not pose any significant threat to other services like Google Translate which supports up to 133 languages.