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Translators recommendations? (lemmy.org)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/fuck_ai@lemmy.world
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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 :)

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[–] 18 points 4 months ago (1 child)

What do you consider an ”AI free” translator? Most, if not all, machine translators rely on some machine learning model.

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  • [–] 11 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (4 children)

    Second this. Dealing with human language is one of the few proper reasons to use machine learning, deep learning and neural somethings. As we can't just transcribe words one by one. That just leads to very weird results no one is able to understand. I think we had rule-based systems and fairly simplistic statistics in the early days of computing. But every sane choice you'd actually want to use, leverages some form of machine learning and "AI". DeepL does that, Google Translate, LibreTranslate, Mozilla...

    That doesn't however mean all the products are the same. There's some blurry lines(?) where things turn into generative AI. But I'm not aware of any usable machine translation that doesn't use some form of AI to figure out context, grammar, idioms, sentence structure and weird things like identical words which have more than one meaning.

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  • [–] 6 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

    Adding to this, transformer models started out in machine translation (the Attention Is All You Need paper is about machine translation). Conceptually it’s the same as previous iterations of machine translator models.

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  • [–] 5 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    Still, not all machine learning is the same. LibreTranslate and Bergamot (the one used by Mozilla) can run very well on old low-spec PCs that wouldn't manage to anything will LLM.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago*

    Yes. I'd also be a bit cautious with just any (LLM) AI service. You could of course copy-paste something into ChatGPT if you wanted. And order it to translate the text. From my experience, it's kinda good at it?! Handles context and idioms and tone better than other solutions. But(!) there's a reason why other machine translation tools don't work like that. There's no guarantee it won't fabricate facts, leave out detail or decide to summarize things in some weird way, and misrepresent what you put in. Pretty much all the things we know AI chatbots do.

    Things like Project Bergamot (which I like to use) are way more efficient because they're made for one specific task. And it's designed to closely follow the input and not do weird things. So I'd prefer these solutions over random AI usage. And they likely also used less resources in some training process. And didn't steal as many books as some other AI companies 😅 I didn't look it up but I bet it's way more ethical to use. Plus it doesn't invade my privacy.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 4 months ago

    Hi! Thank you for your comment.

    You are right in what you said; I should've phrased my question better. What I meant was that I didn't want the ChatGPT-like generative AI kind of thing that tends to hallucinate included in my translation solution of choice. I had just visited the Reverso website prior to writing this post and it was all like AI this, and AI that, and, frankly, it's gotten to the point where it is simply fatiguing to have those two letters shovelled up my throat permanently wherever I go.

    So, yeah, I of course wouldn't mind my translator to keep using the kind of technology that makes translators function, but do despise the slop they are trying so hard for us to accept.

    I have downloaded, but have not tried yet, Dialect on my computer, and am still looking for a solution for my phone.

    Thanks again.

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    • [–] 7 points 4 months ago*

    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.

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    [–] 5 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    I've been using the one built into Firefox, but I'm not 100% sure it's not using AI. I don't think it is, but I never double-checked.

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    • [–] 4 points 4 months ago

    If you want an AI-free translator, then you'll have to do dictionary translation.

    This is the dictionary translator I use for Japanese -> English: ichi.moe

    Yomitan works pretty good for browser Japanese -> English dictionary translation.

    Be aware that using dictionary translation requires some knowledge of the source language's grammar. It can tell you what the pieces mean but you still have to fit them together yourself.

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