Language Machines

Translation services are like pocket change: You don't always need them, but when you do, you're glad you have them. Even though Google Translate hegemony is continuously challenged by DeepL and the like, the premise remains the same: The translation service runs on someone else's hardware, and you pony up for the privilege of using it. Sure, most translation services offer free tiers, but you quickly hit the limit if you need more than just translating an occasional text snippet every now and then, to say nothing of the privacy concerns, of course.

At this point, if you're thinking, "You're going to tell me that there is an open source alternative," you're absolutely right. In fact, there are two – Argos Translate [1] and LibreTranslate [2] – and they're closely related. Argos Translate is an open source neural machine translation engine, a command-line tool (with an optional bare-bones GUI), and a Python library, while LibreTranslate is a self-hosted web application built on top of Argos Translate.

Before you read further, we need to address the elephant in the room: While both Argos Translate and LibreTranslate are impressive feats of linguistics and technology, they are not nearly as good as, say, Google Translate. Probably the best way to describe the quality of both tools is that they are usable, but you wouldn't want to use them to translate fiction or legal documents. On the bright side, the language models used by Argos Translate and LibreTranslate are open source, and the expectation is that they will improve over time.

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