Context support

[domenic]

It's often useful to give context when doing translations. For example, "Turkey" might be translated as 七面鳥 or as トルコ depending on the context.

I've found some evidence of people attempting to give context to non-LLM translation models by using punctuation and sentence structure. For example, if you translate "Togo" by itself with Google Translate, you get "持ち帰り" (basically, "take out" or "to go" for food orders). But if you translate "The country: Togo", you get "国: トーゴ", which is correct. People then build hacks on top of this, hoping that the output stays consistent across slightly varied inputs so that they can use regular expressions or other programming tricks to pull out the "トーゴ" part.

This is fragile. For example, translating "The country: America" gives "国：アメリカ". This is also correct, but the colon punctuation is different: it's a full-width (Japanese) colon for this second example, instead of a half-width (Latin script) colon. So a developer's first-draft code would not work.

It would be ideal if we could abstract over this process for developers, using something like

translator.translate("Togo", { context: "%s is a country name" });

[michaelwasserman]

See a request for this, with a specific use case, made on the Chromium bug tracker

[apellerano-pw]

I think this would be a powerful browser feature.

My use case is translating a bunch of small strings throughout a web page, which may be headings, list items, etc; where there isn't enough context clues to infer meaning.

If the AI translator had this, it would be superior to the browser's existing "Translate Page" feature. Web applications often want to translate just their built-in strings, and not any user-generated strings.

It would also benefit frontend frameworks, where the existing page-wide tool mutates the DOM in a way that breaks framework reactivity. AI translator could effectively move the translation logic into JS where the developer can implement a solution from within the frontend framework's render paradigms.