Hi there! I‘m actively degooogling and switching from proprietary apps to foss.
Recently put away with google translator and put a libretranslate link on my desktop because I need to translate a word or two per day.
Sadly, it regularly gets real easy things wrong. Am I using it wrong? Is it not ready for daily use?
Thanks for reading and any answers.
I noticed that the quality of translation is varying a lot between the languages. Polish for example is very poor in Libretranslate, while Portuguese is quite good.
Tl;dr: Use a dictionary instead. Machine translation isn’t really the correct tool to translate single words.
Maybe check if one of the other instances on the web get it wrong, too. For example you could try: https://libretranslate.com/
From experience I can say libretranslate isn’t as good as Google Trabslate. Especially with figures of speech or single words.
To translate single words, a dictionary works way better. And it gives you several options. So you can choose depending on context.
For translating longer text, I think AI will be the future. I think it already outperforms Google Translate. But I’m not aware if any local AI solution that’d replace Libretranslate (as of now).
It definitely can’t compete with a multi-billion dollar corporation. You might have better luck with using a Google Translane frontend such as Lingva. Lingva Demo
I use SpeechNote from flathub, which can both translate text between several languages offline, it also has good speech to text and text to speech capabilities.
Never heard of it, but I use DeepL, which isn’t OSS, but at least it’s not google and it’s better at translating.
