I think it’d be nice to have an additional section on the recommendations website, under software, for translation software/services.
A couple recommendations for the section would be:
Offline solutions:
Firefox Translations mozilla’s own firefox translations which works on-device/locally
linguist translate, which also has the option to work locally, i found this to provide higher quality translations despite both tools using the bergamot engine, also available on chromium browsers.
Online solutions/services, trust falls on the instance chosen
Simply Translate - supports google, bing & deepl for translation.
Taking this over, because I would like to see it too.
What is the best translation tool, privacy-wise?
I use DeepL, but it seems to be going downhill a bit. I’m not sure how private it still is, but, for example, it now only lets you translate 1500 characters instead of 5000. And their mobile app, which is the only place you can do image translation, is of course non-free.
I haven’t found a better alternative though. I don’t really want to use Lingva, cause it’s still Google (and I just don’t like that). LibreTranslate is not great. As for image translation, I tried Translate You on Android, but I can’t get the data to download. Firefox’s webpage translations are great, but only work if you use Firefox, on the desktop. Otherwise, I don’t know what else can do either image or webpage translation.
Moreover, Firefox translation only supports 10 languages, and other 7 languages that’s still in development. Therefore, it isn’t usable for most people (yet), including mine.
I use Brave for webpage translation, which supports 109 languages (Lingvanex). According to their docs, Brave removes IP addresses associated with requests submitted to the translation service and any text submitted is notretained after the request completes. I think this is the best option, privacy-wise. But it’s noticeably slower than Chrome’s Google Translate.
For other use cases, LibreTranslate could be a good candidate. It supports self-host and offline translation.
Unfortunately that’s inevitably going to happen. Big companies like Google have a lot more resources, and can work on a lot more languages.
The problem is, LibreTranslate just isn’t actually a very accurate translator. It may work then, to get the overall idea of a message you find on the internet. But for anything even half-important, you cannot trust it.
Does anyone really tested those? Translate You is the better because it allows you to choose between a dozen frontends, and support local OCR to get a hacky image translation (all format will be lost)
What people forget is that LLMs are amazing translation tool, so using a private LLM (like Brave Leo or DuckDuckGo Chat) is also a good option.
Wanted to ask what you think of it. I have seen it on some pages as a suggestion as an open source alternative to Google translation and co. However, it is not listed as recommended here on privacyguides. Is there a reason?