With DeepL moving to AWS, I’ll obviously stop using it and I am thus in search of a new translator solution.
I feel, however, as if most translators are jumping to AI and I do not trust the technology enough, so the question arises: are there any good AI-free translators left? I need both for PC and an Android app; searching on F Droid and Discover (KDE Plasma) brings some results, but I thought of asking you guys if you recommend something in particular.
Thank you very much and have a nice day :)
I think all machine translators not based on machine are basically dead. I promise that you haven’t used one in more than 10 years.
Do understand that there is a range of machine learning technologies that can be used, and they are not all the same.
DeepL, LibreTranslate or Bergamot (the one built into Firefox) use specialized models that are orders of magnitude more efficient than just using ChatGPT for it. I’d bet this is the same for Google translate, but can’t promise.
I personally use a combination of these three. DeepL I use mostly from FairEmail on my phone, because the app only supports that and it still seems like a mostly reasonable service, and I use the built-in Bergamot of Firefox mobile for surfing.
From my PC (8 year old laptop) it’s Firefox/Bergamot for the web, and I run LibreTranslate locally in a container for my emails (KMail has built-in support) as well as PDFs and documents in general.
LibreTranslate looks and behaves like your typical google translate, and you can try it out the website of the project.
If “never AI for anything” is a hill you’re willing to die on, you can take a look at Apertium. But ML-based translation is almost always way better, even locally on a fairly low-spec machine.