This proposal is an early design sketch by the Chrome built-in AI team to describe the problem below and solicit feedback on the proposed solution. It

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2024-09-23 00:30:06

This proposal is an early design sketch by the Chrome built-in AI team to describe the problem below and solicit feedback on the proposed solution. It has not been approved to ship in Chrome.

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:

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. This proposal introduces a new JavaScript API for exposing a browser's existing language translation abilities to web pages, so that if present, they can serve as a simpler and less resource-intensive alternative.

An important supplement to translation is language detection. This can be combined with translation, e.g. taking user input in an unknown language and translating it to a specific target language. In a similar way, browsers today often already have langauge detection capabilities, and we want to offer them to web developers through a JavaScript API.