Translating the World Without Google
Google Translate is pretty neat. It can translate images live for you; it can help do live translations; it gives product managers an undeserved level of confidence in asserting that you don't really need to pay for professional localization services.
It's great. It's powerful. It's free.
I don't use it.
I'm not a fan of closed-source, siloed public goods. It's a lockable door that Google can shut at any time it wants - whether because they decide to send it to the product graveyard in which Reader rests eternal or they decide they're better off monetizing it with a subscription fee.
Side note: the fact that it's free means that Google is likely profiting off your use of it. As it's often said: if you're not paying for the product, you are the product.
This isn't meant to frame the world as "Google Translate or nothing". There's a whole bevy of services that provide translations. However, between the market dominance that Android enjoys in the mobile market and how that's used as a springboard to bring people into Google Translate (not to mention its integration with things like Google Assistant and Gemini), it's likely the extent of what people know about what translation apps exist out there.
So, what do I use? It's a combination of free and could-be-free open-source software:
- TranslateYou: an app that provides integrations with multiple different providers (DeepL, LibreTranslate, and others) to provide translations
- SherpaTTS: an app that provides the text-to-speech emulation to vocalize the text within TranslateYou (and elsewhere on your phone)
- LibreTranslate: a service that you can either pay $29 / month to use or host yourself to provide translations
What's the benefit here?
- SherpaTTS is a wholly-offline text-to-speech engine. Not only does that mean less use of my mobile data plan; it also means that the contents of what I'm writing or reading do not pass through a third-party service (e.g., Google) for monetization by them.
- The $29 I pay to LibreTranslate helps fund the continued development of translation software that remains publicly accessible to others. Whether you want to pay for the access, yourself, or run your own instance of the service yourself, the world's a better place when the ability to overcome language barriers is easily accessible.
- If neither of these options sounds appealing to you, I'll re-iterate that TranslateYou supports multiple translation providers, so, if you don't vibe with LibreTranslate, don't let that stop you from trying out SherpaTTS with TranslateYou.
Do as I Say; Do as I do
I recently had the opportunity to use it while visiting Brussels and Amsterdam. My Dutch is functional as long as the topic doesn't stray from common topics of conversation; my French is elementary, at best. Being able to drop text into TranslateYou (either via its image recognition or just typing it in manually) was immensely helpful in translating the multitude of French phrases I don't know and the not-inconsiderable Dutch words I don't know. It was a nice validation of my decision to use this stack to navigate my way through places where English wasn't always an available language.
Credits
Icon for this post was sourced from Wikipedia.
