The LibreTranslate.com project is an open-source alternative to Google Translate, which can be used both directly from the website, or from the Dialect app. But it gets even better: you can run LibreTranslate easily on your local system.

Find the sources at LibreTranslate GitHub page; here’s the LibreTranslate installation documentation. The easiest way is to run LibreTranslate via docker:

$ docker run --rm -ti -p 5000:5000 -v lt-local:/home/libretranslate/.local libretranslate/libretranslate

Note: to avoid huge downloads, you can limit the languages with e.g. --load-only en,fi. Here is the LibreTranslate documentation on command-line arguments.

Once everything starts, open localhost:5000 and start translating.

Dialect

The Dialect app can provide very simple translation client:

$ sudo apt install dialect

Start the app, then go to Preferences / Providers, and set “Translator” to “LibreTranslate”. By default, the LibreTranslate.com will be used as backend. To reconfigure to use your local instance press the cog wheel icon to the left of the “Translator” configuration and enter localhost:5000 as the Instance URL.

Now Dialect will use the local LibreTranslate.

Accelerated Translation

By default the translation will use CPU only; longer texts may take a while to get translated. If you have Nvidia, LibreTranslate supports CUDA but I never tested that.