Best Free and Open Source Alternatives to Google Translate

Google has a firm grip with their products and services ubiquitous on the desktop. Don’t get us wrong, we’re long-standing admirers of many of Google’s products and services. They are often high quality, easy to use, and ‘free’, but there can be downsides of over-reliance on a specific company. For example, there can be questions about their privacy policies, business practices, and an almost insatiable desire to control all of our data, all of the time.

What if you are looking to move away from Google and embark on a new world of online freedom, where you are not constantly tracked, monetised and attached to Google’s ecosystem.

In this series we explore how you can migrate from Google without missing out on anything. We recommend open source solutions.

Google Translate is a multilingual neural machine translation service that translates text and websites from one language into another.

It offers a website interface, a mobile app, and an application programming interface that helps developers build browser extensions and software applications.

What open source alternatives are available? Unfortunately, alternatives are somewhat lean on the ground, but here are the best.

1. Pot

Pot is a cross-platform translator application that offers translation by selection and input. It supports clipboard listening, screenshot optical character recognition, and screenshot translation.

Pot offers parallel translations with multiple services. As shown in the image to the right, we’ve entered some sample text which has been translated into Turkish by DeepL, Bing, Yandex, and Google Translate. A very wide range of languages are available although not every single one is supported by each service.

2. Apertium

We also like Apertium. This is a machine translation platform, initially aimed at related-language pairs but expanded to deal with more divergent language pairs (such as English-Catalan). There are 51 language pairs which are mature, and their GitHub repositories contain other language pairs in development.

The platform provides a language-independent machine translation engine, tools to manage the linguistic data necessary to build a machine translation system for a given language pair and linguistic data for a growing number of language pairs.

3. Speech Note

Speech Note lets you take, read and translate notes in multiple languages. It combines the power of Speech to Text, Text to Speech and Machine Translation. Text and voice processing takes place entirely offline, locally on your computer, without using a network connection. Enhanced privacy is always a big advantage with self-hosted software.

4. Argos Translate

Argos Translate is state of the art neural machine translation software. It’s written in Python and published under an open source license. Argos Translate uses OpenNMT for translations and can be used as either a Python library, command-line, or GUI application.

Here’s an image of the GUI in action which uses PyQt, a Python binding of the cross-platform GUI toolkit Qt. The GUI is very basic but functional.

Another useful open source translation solution is LibreTranslate. It’s built on top of Argos Translate. Unlike other APIs, it doesn’t rely on proprietary providers such as Google or Azure to perform translations.

All articles in this series:

Alternatives to Google's Products and Services
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	Drive is a file storage and synchronization service. Want a solution that also includes the online office components available in Google Docs?
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	Firebase is a platform for creating mobile and web applications. It's currently their flagship offering for app development providing an all-in-one cloud service.
	Fonts is a computer font and web font service. It offers font families and an interactive web directory for browsing the library.
	Forms is a survey administration software included as part of the free, web-based Google Docs Editors suite.
	Gboard is a virtual keyboard app developed for Android and iOS devices. It features Google Search and predictive answers.
	Gmail is a hugely popular email service. You might not like the automated scanning of email content.
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	News is a news aggregator service. It offers a continuous flow of links to articles organized from thousands of publishers and magazines.
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	Search looks at privacy-focused alternatives to Google Search. If you believe that Google invades your privacy, what alternatives do we recommend?
	Sheets is a spreadsheet program included as part of the free, web-based Google Docs Editors suite.
	Sites is a structured wiki and web page creation tool. Build internal project hubs, team sites, public-facing websites, and more—all without designer, programmer, or IT help.
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	Tasks is a task management application which lets users manage, capture, and edit their tasks. It's included with Google Workspace.
	Translate is a multilingual neural machine translation service that translates text and websites from one language into another.
	YouTube is an online video sharing and social media platform. It's a hugely popular service but has encountered a number of privacy issues.