Translation programs for Linux

The Internet made available to users a variety of content in multiple languages. And, since it is impossible to know them all, we are going to list some translation programs for Linux.

We find two types of programs, those that support professional translators and those that allow translations suitable for home users. The latter are usually graphical interfaces of some online translation service.

It is said that during the Cold War the president of the United States was shown translation software that converted sentences from English to Russian and from Russian to English. Everything was going well until the president was informed that his wife had been waiting for him for a long time. His involuntary exclamation "What you don't see goes out of your head" was answered by "Invisible idiot."

Some decades later artificial translators have improved, although they still have problems with the context. I remember that in my rush to watch a well-known series I downloaded some subtitles translated by Google and spent 5 minutes trying to find out who that Doctor House was that all the characters were talking about.

On the other hand, DeepL, which is usually much more reliable than Google Translate for online translations, usually removes words that are between symbols such as hyphens, periods or quotes.

In any case, the thing to keep in mind is that the use of these programs still requires human supervision of the final result.

Translation programs for Linux

OmegaT

In this case it is not a translator but a SCHEDULE of help to the translation that is in the repositories and is also available for Windows and Mac. The program works from resources generated or obtained by the user such as dictionaries and phrase equivalencies.

After the user enters the documents to be translated, the phrase equivalencies and the dictionaries available in the specific folders, OmegaT extracts the text to be translated and incorporates it into the phrase equivalence document. The end result is the translated document.

In the case of finding a partial match, it is displayed in a separate window so that the translator can decide whether to incorporate it or not. It is possible to set a threshold for partial matches to be inserted automatically.

Among other formats it is possible to insert documents from Microsoft Office, LibreOffice and plain text.

anaphrases

This is not a program itself but an extension for OpenOffice and LibreOffice. It is used to create the translation memories (equivalences between sentences) that are used by programs such as OmegaT. Integrates with Google, Apertium and Bing online translation engines.

Translation

Moving on to home users this is the tool machine translation that I use and recommend. From now on I clarify that it is proprietary software. Translatium can be installed on Linux in Snap or Appimage format as well as being available for Windows, Mac and mobile devices.

It translates more than 100 languages ​​and can also read the translated text. Personally, I think your speech synthesizer has the best pronunciation I've heard on Linux.

You can translate images and texts from the clipboard automatically.

translate shell

Here we have an application to use from the terminal. Is it in the repositories or you can download dfrom GiHub. The program uses Google, Bing Translator, Yandex.Translate and Apertium translation engines. Unless otherwise stated, Google is the default option.

With Translate Shell you can translate words, phrases and plain text files. It can also be used as an interactive interface that translates as we type. To see the full instructions, after installation we can type

mann translate-shell

We can install it with these commands:

Debian Ubuntu and derived distributions
sudo apt-get install translate-shell
Arch Linux, Manjaro and derived distributions.
sudo pacman -S translate-shell
fedora:
sudo dnf install translate-shell

What is your experience with Linux translation programs? Is there any other program or service you want to recommend us?