Contact emails

dome...@chromium.org, fer...@chromium.org, kenjibah...@chromium.org,
a...@chromium.org, memm...@chromium.org, christin...@chromium.org

Explainer

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

Specification

https://webmachinelearning.github.io/translation-api

Summary

A JavaScript API to provide language translation capabilities to web pages.


Blink component

Blink>AI>Translate
<https://issues.chromium.org/issues?q=customfield1222907:%22Blink%3EAI%3ETranslate%22>

TAG review

https://github.com/w3ctag/design-reviews/issues/948

TAG review status

Issues addressed

Origin Trial Name

Translator API

Chromium Trial Name

TranslationAPI

Origin Trial documentation link

https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/translator-api

WebFeature UseCounter name

kTranslator_Create

Risks

Interoperability and Compatibility

This feature has definite interoperability risks, including which languages
are available across different browsers, how they are exposed, the quality
of translations, and whether developers need the translations to be
on-device or not. We can ameliorate some of these through API design, by
making it clear that various methods might fail and that a fallback is
required. Others, like translation quality, may end up as
quality-of-implementation issues, similar to other machine learning-based
APIs like shape detection.


Gecko: No signal (https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/1015
)

WebKit: No signal (https://github.com/WebKit/standards-positions/issues/339)

Web developers: Positive (https://github.com/WICG/proposals/issues/147)

Other signals:

Activation

This feature would definitely benefit from having polyfills, backed by any
of: cloud services, lazily-loaded on-device models using WebGPU, or the web
developer's own server. We anticipate seeing an ecosystem of such polyfills
grow as more developers experiment with this API.


WebView application risks

Does this intent deprecate or change behavior of existing APIs, such that
it has potentially high risk for Android WebView-based applications?

None


Goals for experimentation

Reason this experiment is being extended

There has been an overhaul to the API shape in the spec that we're
currently implementing. We'd like to continue the OT to get feedback on the
new API shape once it's ready to evaluate.

Substantial progress has been made in the following areas:

   -

   Draft spec: the spec is now complete.
   -

   TAG review: the tag review is complete.
   -

   Signals requests: other browsers have not yet made any progress on these.
   -

   Outreach for feedback from the spec community: we've discussed this API
   a few times at Web ML Community Group meetings. Additionally, feedback from
   the internationalization spec community was helpful in resolving
   https://github.com/webmachinelearning/translation-api/issues/11 .
   -

   WPT tests: we now have some basic WPTs for invalid inputs and a single
   success case.



Ongoing technical constraints

None.


Debuggability

During the origin trial, web developers can use
chrome://on-device-translation-internals/ to manage language pack
installation. And, by setting chrome://flags/#translation-api flag to
"Enabled without language pack limit", developers can work around the
privacy-focused restrictions during local testing. If the feature is
successful, these may eventually graduate into DevTools features.


Will this feature be supported on all six Blink platforms (Windows, Mac,
Linux, ChromeOS, Android, and Android WebView)?

No

Only supported on desktop platforms during the Origin Trial period.


Is this feature fully tested by web-platform-tests
<https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/main/docs/testing/web_platform_tests.md>
?

No

We have some web platform test coverage for this feature (
https://wpt.fyi/results/ai/translator?label=experimental&label=master&aligned),
but how much we can guarantee as testable beyond the surface API is
unclear. For example, since no specific languages are guaranteed to be
supported, it's not clear we can actually test translations. APIs to mock
the results might help here.


Flag name on about://flags

translation-api

Finch feature name

TranslationAPI

Requires code in //chrome?

True

Tracking bug

https://issues.chromium.org/issues/322229993

Measurement

kTranslator_Create

Estimated milestones

Origin trial desktop first

131

Origin trial desktop last

136

Origin trial extension 1 end milestone

138


Anticipated spec changes

Open questions about a feature may be a source of future web compat or
interop issues. Please list open issues (e.g. links to known github issues
in the project for the feature specification) whose resolution may
introduce web compat/interop risk (e.g., changing to naming or structure of
the API in a non-backward-compatible way).

At this point all known proposed changes have been incorporated into the
specification and implementation.

Link to entry on the Chrome Platform Status

https://chromestatus.com/feature/5172811302961152?gate=5155440738172928

Links to previous Intent discussions

Intent to Prototype:
https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msgid/blink-dev/2a9d154a-dc97-495b-afda-ba643712116bn%40chromium.org

Intent to Experiment:
https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msgid/blink-dev/CAM0wra9ArjjD0u%3DpFs1W_5%3DcMk49JXs5ObQ15dNHCHt3TKSW3g%40mail.gmail.com

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