Google Translate Alternatives

Best Free and Open Source Alternatives to Apple Translate

There are many things to admire about Apple’s hardware and software. Apple make great looking (albeit expensive) hardware. Over the years key successes include the iPhone, iPad, iPod, and the MacBook Air. The company designs its own hardware and software. This gives them the power to make an operating system and suite of apps that are tailor-made and optimized for their hardware. Apple also operates the Apple Music and Apple TV media distribution platforms.

Mac OS X is Apple’s proprietary operating system for its line of Macintosh computers. Its interface, known as Aqua, is highly polished and built on top of a BSD derivative (Darwin). There’s a whole raft of proprietary applications that are developed by Apple for their operating software. This software is not available for Linux and there’s no prospect of that position changing.

Translate is a translation app developed by Apple for their iOS and iPadOS devices. It functions as a service for translating text sentences or speech between several languages. Here are the best free and open source alternatives for Linux.


1. Pot

Pot translate
Click image for full size

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.

Apertium
Click image for full size

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.

Speech Note translator


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.

Argos Translate GUI


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 Apple's Products
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Translate is a translation app developed by Apple for their iOS and iPadOS devices. It functions as a service for translating text sentences or speech between several languages.
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Liam
Liam
27 days ago

I just tried Pot, impressive stuff.