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Translator API

Category
Miscellaneous
Type
New or changed feature
Status
Origin trial (Chrome 138)
Intent stage
None

Summary

A JavaScript API to provide language translation capabilities to web pages. Browsers are increasingly offering language translation to their users. Such translation capabilities can also be useful to web developers. This is especially the case when browser's built-in translation abilities cannot help. An enterprise policy (GenAILocalFoundationalModelSettings) is available to disable the underlying model downloading which would render this API unavailable.

Motivation

Browsers are increasingly offering language translation to their users. Such translation capabilities can also be useful to web developers. This is especially the case when browser's built-in translation abilities cannot help, such as: - translating user input or other interactive features; - pages with complicated DOMs which trip up browser translation; - providing in-page UI to start the translation; or - translating content that is not in the DOM, e.g. spoken content. To perform translation in such cases, web sites currently have to either call out to cloud APIs, or bring their own translation models and run them using technologies like WebAssembly and WebGPU.

Standards & signals

Explainers: https://github.com/webmachinelearning/translation-api/blob/main/README.md

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