I am aware of DeepL but I was hoping to find another option that works well to translate PDFs and other docs to English in a privacy respecting way. And that doesn’t cost or doesn’t too much.
Please share your solutions. Any help is much appreciated! Thank you.
If you only want to translate the text, without formatting, try LM Studio, and use models like Gemma 3.
Edit: If it forms a part of legal document and you need to follow a list of glossaries, that might also work, but you will need to double check the consistency.
Depending on the length of your document, you might need to set a large context length, e.g. 60-80k.
LibreTranslate could be used for this and there are Android apps that could also apparently plug themselves to it so that you could take a photo and translate from there. 
You seem concerned about maintaining your privacy and security when you open your PDF files.
I made this thread earlier and I think you’ll find some useful information: PDF Reader That Is The Best For User Privacy? - #65 by Average_Joe
That is not what I was asking if you read my OP again.
But thank you. I did read that thread and am already aware of DangerZone.
Have you tried Lumo? It is not able to create PDF or Word file but at least it is able to translate books.
I have not tried it yet. I want to translate business documents so I do want accuracy and reliability.
I can give it a shot but I don’t have high hopes from AI.
Even DeepL is using AI on its translation. Not sure if you can find something better for business related documents. Also if you want privacy, you should get DeepL Pro and avoid free version
Yeah, that’s what I am thinking too. I see no other option. Atleast DeepL Ai seems purpose built for translation. Others don’t.
Thanks again!
If it is business then you would really need to use platform that offers custom dictionary / glossary. In my limited experience, generic LLM does good enough for most translation tasks, if you supplied a well defined system prompt and custom dictionary / glossary.
Thank you for the insight. I think LibreTranslate and DeepL are the only two options I have that seemed to work well enough.
A bit late, as I only just joined, but has anybody tried https://translate.kagi.com?
It’s in beta, but it’s free, and this is what they state about their accepted document formats:
TXT, MD, DOC, DOCX, CSV, PDF, PPTX, XLSX, XLS, RTF, TSV, HTML, ODT, ODS, JSON, YAML, SRT, ASS, ENV, LOG, VTT, MDX, RMD, IPYNB, TEX, WS, ROFF
Up to 150MB and 60K characters
Thank you for sharing. I feel stupid to have forgotten Kagi had this. I’ll give this a shot.
I think you can do it in google translate too.
