Intent to Prototype: Language Detector and Translator APIs on Android
Jaewon Lee
Contact emails
Explainer
https://github.com/webmachinelearning/translation-api
Specification
https://webmachinelearning.github.io/translation-api
Summary
Exposes the LanguageDetector and Translator JavaScript Web APIs on Chrome for Android (Clank). This allows web applications to detect text languages and perform text translation locally on mobile devices using fast, privacy-preserving, and offline-capable on-device machine learning models without relying on cloud endpoints or increasing site download size.
Blink component
https://issues.chromium.org/issues?q=componentid:1583316
Web Feature ID
Motivation
Exposing the Language Detector API and Translator API on Chrome for Android allows web applications to perform fast, privacy-preserving, and offline-capable text processing directly within mobile browsers. Language detection and translation are complementary capabilities in real-world web applications—such as chat apps, comment streams, and social feeds—where developers must first identify an unknown input language before translating it. Routing these APIs to platform-native machine learning engines eliminates reliance on cloud translation endpoints or heavy third-party scripts, enabling seamless on-device AI capabilities while establishing feature parity across desktop and mobile web platforms.
Initial public proposal
Translator I2S: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/eCE8jIW2auo
Language Detector I2S: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/sWcHBe9wpbo
Goals for experimentation
Demonstrate implementability of these APIs using Android's ML Kit framework
Requires code in //chrome?
True
Requires browser-layer code in //chrome/browser/on_device_translation and Java/JNI glue in //chrome/android to interface with Android ML Kit system services and manage Play Feature Delivery dynamic module downloads.
Tracking bug
Estimated milestones
No milestones specified
Link to entry on the Chrome Platform Status
https://chromestatus.com/feature/5106126157905920?gate=5168017576165376
Jaewon Lee
We are posting a quick update regarding the previously sent Intent to Prototype for the LanguageDetector and Translator APIs on Android.
We have split LanguageDetector and Translator into separate ChromeStatus entries to decouple their execution paths:
- LanguageDetector API on Android: Now tracked independently at https://chromestatus.com/feature/5087964794322944?gate=5112297327558656 and progressing using Chrome's existing renderer-side TFLite model.
- Translator API on Android: Will continue to be tracked under the existing entry at https://chromestatus.com/feature/5106126157905920.
Daniel Bratell
Not really related to the web APIs, but since Chrome/Chromium has a pre-LLM language detector (cld3?), I get curious about how TFLite and that one compare? Could we drop one or the other in favour of the best one? If not now, maybe in a reasonable future timeline?
/Daniel
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