I have finally got this thing running now, and it’s really great (although the installation process is rather confusing).
I am not using the “LibreTranslate” thing, but the argos-translate local CLI program.
While it works for simple queries such as:
argos-translate.py --from en --to de "Does it work?"
… there are many situations where I need to translate a big blob of text, for example an incoming e-mail message. Sending that as a command over the command line is very problematic to say the least.
Sadly, unlike other programs which accept text input and output text, argos-translate does not support using a file as input instead. For example, it would be something like:
argos-translate.py --from en --to de -i "query.txt" -o "translation.txt"
This would entirely bypass all the numerous issues with trying to send the whole text as part of a command. Also, if it supports output to a file, it also prevents the strange issue where argos-translate appears to only output one line on the standard output. (I’m unsure why that happens to begin with.)
Could you please implement this? It would make it infinitely more useful for anything but a basic one-sentence test string!
Please don’t make me use LibreTranslate. I don’t need or want that whole thing, but I recognize that others probably find it very useful. I’m just looking for translating texts entirely locally, with as minimum an installation as possible. Which is why argos-translate would be perfect if it only would support input/output files.
(For what it’s worth, I find the difference between argos-translate, LibreTranslate and its commercial API service to be rather fuzzy and unclear, but maybe that’s just me being confused as usual.)