Browser-Native Translation and Language Detection APIs Coming Soon

Just reviewed the W3C draft for the Translator and Language Detector APIs. This is genuinely exciting development for web developers.

The proposal would add native browser support for:

• Text translation between languages
• Language detection of arbitrary text
• Both with streaming capabilities

No more relying on third-party translation services or embedding external APIs for basic language operations. All processing happens locally in the browser.

The API design is clean and straightforward:

// Translation example
const translator = await Translator.create({
  sourceLanguage: "en",
  targetLanguage: "fr"
});

const translatedText = await translator.translate("Hello world");

// Language detection example
const detector = await LanguageDetector.create();
const results = await detector.detect("Hello world");
// Returns array of detected languages with confidence scores

This will be a game-changer for multilingual sites and applications. The browser handles downloading appropriate language models and manages usage quotas.

The spec is still in draft form but shows promising progress toward standardizing these capabilities across browsers. Looking forward to seeing this implemented.