Soon you’ll visit a webpage in an unfamiliar language and see it automatically translated to one you can read with the iPhone Safari web browser. This reportedly will be a feature of iOS 14.
No third-party app will be needed. And the translation will supposedly take place directly on the handset, not a remote server.
Safari translations could be a highlight of iOS 14
Evidence of seamless translations by Safari is buried in iOS 14, according to 9to5Mac. A copy of Apple’s upcoming operating system leaked out earlier this year.
Users will allegedly have the option to automatically translate every website written in an unfamiliar language into one the user prefers. Or they can do it on a site-by-site basis.
There are apps and websites that can handle this job, but they are require running the webpage to be translated through a server. On iPhone, the feature will be supposedly handled locally by the Neural Engine, dedicated neural-network hardware for artificial intelligence tasks built into recent Apple A-series processors. It will allow language conversions without an internet connection, and also give users privacy.
Plenty of iOS 14 rumors to go around
If this unconfirmed report about a new Safari translation feature really turns out to be true, Apple will announce it at the Worldwide Developers Conference later this month.
But we don’t have to wait that long. Thanks to that leaked copy of iOS 14, quite a bit is already known about what CEO Tim Cook and friends will unveil on June 22 on WWDC. It’s apparently the source of screenshots of a new iPhone multitasking layout. And it’s how the public found out that iPhones might soon act as car keys. The leaked copy supposedly revealed details of iOS 14’s built-in augmented reality viewer, too.
