Google Translate is great, until it’s not. The quality of translation is undeniably impressive, and the apps have some genuinely useful features. But even if you choose to ignore the fact that Google lives off our data, there is a matter of Google Translate not working offline—not on a Linux system, anyway. And even if it could do that, there is still a case to be made for using and supporting an open-source alternative free from the shackles of surveillance capitalism.
Enter Argos Translate, an open-source neural machine translation engine that works offline and is available as a Python library, a command-line tool, a web application, and a desktop utility. Install Argos Translate on your machine, add a simple Bash shell script, and you can instantly translate a text selection from any application. Here is how to do this on Ubuntu and Linux Mint.