Our Machine Learning in Linux series focuses on apps that make it easy to experiment with machine learning.
We recently explored Argos Translate, state of the art neural machine translation software. That software provides a Python library, command-line interface, and a GUI.
LibreTranslate is a machine translation API which is entirely self-hosted. This software lets you use open source machine translation in your projects. It uses Argos Translate for its translation engine.
Installation
We tested LibreTranslate with the Arch distro. As we recommended in our review of Argos Translate, use a virtual environment to install LibreTranslate. We’ll use conda, but you may prefer to run the software with Docker.
Create our conda environment with the command:
$ conda create --name libretranslate
Activate that environment with the command:
$ conda activate libretranslate
Install the software with all the dependencies with the command:
$ pip install libretranslate
This command downloads the Python packages to ~/.local/lib/python3.11/site-packages and takes up 4.4GB of disk space.
You’ll see output such as this if everything proceeds normally.
Successfully installed APScheduler-3.9.1 Babel-2.12.1 Flask-2.2.2 Flask-Babel-3.1.0 Flask-Limiter-2.6.3 Flask-Session-0.4.0 LTpycld2-0.42 Werkzeug-2.2.2 argos-translate-files-1.1.1 argostranslate-1.8.0 beautifulsoup4-4.9.3 cachelib-0.10.2 charset-normalizer-2.1.1 cmake-3.26.4 commonmark-0.9.1 ctranslate2-2.24.0 expiringdict-1.2.2 flask-swagger-0.2.14 flask-swagger-ui-4.11.1 importlib-resources-5.12.0 libretranslate-1.3.11 limits-3.5.0 morfessor-2.0.6 mpmath-1.3.0 networkx-3.1 numpy-1.25.0 nvidia-cublas-cu11-11.10.3.66 nvidia-cuda-cupti-cu11-11.7.101 nvidia-cuda-nvrtc-cu11-11.7.99 nvidia-cuda-runtime-cu11-11.7.99 nvidia-cudnn-cu11-8.5.0.96 nvidia-cufft-cu11-10.9.0.58 nvidia-curand-cu11-10.2.10.91 nvidia-cusolver-cu11-11.4.0.1 nvidia-cusparse-cu11-11.7.4.91 nvidia-nccl-cu11-2.14.3 nvidia-nvtx-cu11-11.7.91 polib-1.1.1 prometheus-client-0.15.0 redis-4.3.4 requests-2.28.1 rich-12.6.0 sentencepiece-0.1.96 stanza-1.1.1 sympy-1.12 torch-2.0.1 translatehtml-1.5.2 triton-2.0.0 tzlocal-5.0.1 waitress-2.1.2
The first time you run libretranslate, the software will download the language models if they are not already installed (if you’ve previously installed Argos Translate).
The language models are stored in ~/.local/share/argos-translate/packages and consume about 7GB of disk space.
Next page: Page 2 – In Operation and Summary
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction and Installation
Page 2 – In Operation and Summary