Support Chinese translations

[marco]

Add Chinese as a supported language for translations in Firefox.

[santoshpc]

Is there an expected timeline when Chinese Translation support will make it to production? I'm still using Google Translate, and it'll be amazing to just rely on Firefox to manage the entire process.

[marco]

@santoshpc  the plan is for early in 2025.

[nordzilla]

@santoshpc as Marco said, we are aiming for early 2025.

I have just enabled an experimental zh-Hans,en (Simplified Chinese to English) translation model in Firefox Nightly if you want to try it out today.

This is not the final model that will ship, and I expect the translation quality to improve before the final release, however feedback is most certainly welcome, which is why we make things available early in Nightly.

[wutongtaiwan]

@nordzilla I didn't find the translation model you said in the lab

[nordzilla]

Hi @wutongtaiwan, thanks for this clarification!

It's not in the lab within the settings. The model is just available in Firefox Nightly when translating from Simplified Chinese into another language.

When I said it's experimental, I didn't mean to imply that it was in the lab. I just meant that it's only available in Firefox Nightly, and that it is not the final model that we will ship.

[Jeriff]

We need translation from English to Chinese 

[Jeriff]

@nordzilla 

I think you guys misunderstood our propose, we need translation from English to Chinese, so 1.4 billion people who speak Chinese can read English articles and news on the Internet.

[nordzilla]

@Jeriff thanks for your feedback.

We are working on all of these use cases, but the experimental model that I have available to share with Firefox Nightly users at this time happens to be a model that translates from Simplified Chinese as a source language.

We appreciate your patience as we continue to train more models and ensure that the Translations platform can robustly handle multiple writing scripts.

[santoshpc]

@nordzilla 

Translation from Chinese to English is a great start. It would be great to translate into Chinese as well but this is already immensely helpful. Thank you