Although the Vivaldi web browser has a handy language translation tool built in, I'm not keen on having to post every snippet I want to translate out to the Internet (and rely on someone else's CPU time and goodwill).

LibreTranslate - libretranslate.com - turned out to be easy to set up. It's free, open source, and you can run it on your own hardware.

There are instructions on their GitHub page, but I just set up an LXC based on Debian 12 with 2GB RAM and 30GB disk, added a Python venv, and ran "pip install libretranslate". After downloading everything, it occupied 4.6GB of disk for the code and 8.7GB for the data. Then, I gave it a systemd service file to make it start on boot, and stuck HAProxy in front of it along with a self-signed certificate.

So now I have my own offline translation tool and thanks to a trivial shell script wrapper for the API (using curl), I can translate short snippets from the command line, too. I recommend trying it out if you've got a bit of disk and RAM to spare.

#FOSS #Linux #InternationalTranslationDay #curl

LibreTranslate - Free and Open Source Machine Translation API

Free and Open Source Machine Translation API. Self-hosted, offline capable and easy to setup. Run your own API server in just a few minutes.

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