https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/yrdeyc/libretranslate_free_and_open_source_machine/
I really really like this project.
But it’s simply not at a good and usable state at the moment. It desperately needs to have its memory use curtailed and it needs more language models.
That said, I keep it around to spin up on occasion just to test it and submit feedback when things don’t work as expected
It’s a great project but the translation quality pretty much sucks
I love that you submitted the docker install link as the Reddit post
Note that you don’t want to run this unless you have plenty of RAM for it. I forget the exact numbers but it’ll happily load gigabytes of data into memory. Probably fine on your desktop, less so on a rented VPS.
Does it have an option to translate a webpage, similar to Google Translate?
Translation models, and language models in general are incredibly resource-heavy.
Ideally it’d need to use around 16gb of RAM at all times and that won’t even make it quick if you don’t have a GPU to support inference, this is just to keep the model in memory. I’m also sure this is the reason the translation performance is subpar, they probably use a relatively small model.
Language models are open source, so in theory anyone could make amazing translation engines with very little effort, but they’d be burning a lot of money doing so. I think some tasks are just not worth self hosting, and translation is one of these. It’s a very cool project regardless!
I also wanted to love the project, and it’s great that it exists, but the translations to / from Chinese are just not good.