Meta has been in the news in the language industry a lot lately. After Meta AI unveiled its machine translation roadmap and announced its switch to monolingual vendors, Meta AI released its latest major language model, the OPT-175B, as open source.
And then, a few days after Meta announced OPT-175B in early May, the social media giant revealed that it had developed a mobile location infrastructure. This includes downloadable language packs to provide Android and iOS users with download-on-demand translation.
With this mobile location infrastructure, engineers will, among other things, be able to create and deliver gender-specific translations more efficiently. (Reducing gender bias has, of course, been an ongoing quest in machine learning.)
The infrastructure has already been transferred to Facebook and Workplace apps, where Meta wants to integrate it into more products in the future.
Without increasing the size of the app or decreasing its speed, with language packs, the iOS App Store pack (The IPA) size of Facebook for iOS has been reduced by 16.6 MB, keeping it fast and responsive for users.
The importance of language packs was explained in a post by Engineering at Meta. It all boils down to traditional localization frameworks as they are offered today by native Android and iOS platforms, presenting two major scaling issues.
The first question has to do with translation accuracy. Built-in Android and iOS localization frameworks only support plain text and pluralized text, making it difficult to create gender-disaggregated text without standard code.
To solve this problem, Meta developed its own string API and framework called FBT, which supports PHP, Hack, Javascript and React Native. This API allows the system to easily define and send grammatically correct translated texts, including both viewer and subject gender.
The second question is about language support and app size. Meta conducted an app size test for the Facebook iOS app and realized that by removing all the translation files from the package, it could save up to 16.6 MB in download size. Since most people use only one language on their device, the rest of the translation files in the package would take up unnecessary space.
The solution: downloadable language packs. To support the FBT API and to send accurate translations on mobile, each language packet file includes all translation variants. To support multiple languages while limiting app size, Meta offers a download-on-demand solution where devices download only the required language packet file.
Meta has stated that the language package framework is not a solution that suits everyone and they are constantly seeking to improve the infrastructure.
Meta’s broader mission
VP of internationalization, product quality and product experience at Meta, Iris Orriss, joined SlatorPod to talk about the company’s vision. The language packages are only part of the company’s internationalization strategy, which includes three broad aspects: global activation, the removal of the language barrier and the removal of the cultural barrier.
While Meta currently supports the major Internet languages, it also aims to serve those who are not well represented online. Part of the strategy is thus to work through the next languages with the greatest potential to become great. “We have to remove the language barriers for that kind of language, because otherwise we can not bridge it [language and cultural] hole, “said Orriss.
The development is in line with Meta’s shift from community translation to working with single language providers (SLVs) to help build the translation infrastructure for larger languages that are underrepresented on the Internet.