I’m looking for a robust translation app that respect privacy and doesn’t collect user data or send text to servers.
I’ve tried a few options, but I’d like to hear about your experiences: What do you actually use?
Thanks in advance 🙏
IIRC On Firefox Desktop (or any forks of it) there is a built in translation tool,
You can also prompt engineer local LLMS into translating text for you.I believe Firefox allows you to point your local LLM (that you self host) as the “ai assistant”, so that when you click translate, your own machine (localhost) does the work. I’ve found the Qwen3 series models (Qwen3-4B) to have been quite capable at translation; I imagine the newer ones are even better.
I use Translate You installed from Droid-ify.
https://f-droid.org/packages/dev.davidv.translator/
It’s super fast, offline and has å API so other apps can use it too.
I’m using it to translate my SMS automatically, forked Fossify Messages and integrated this offline translator into it: https://git.jeena.net/jeena/sms-translate/src/branch/feature/upstream-translation-patch/README-translation.md
For pages and documents, Firefox does it locally by using a small model for each language you can download once. Which is great and private.
If you want to type something an get it the translation, perhaps DeepL, but your text is sent to their server, which is not great.
There is an open source translation app that uses the same translation models in Firefox:
https://f-droid.org/packages/dev.davidv.translator/
It can translate text, documents and imagesAnd, as several others mentioned, these same models can be downloaded in an offline app called offline translator in fdroid.
I suspect local AI models are the answer, but only second best to learning the language.
I use Translator from the Fdroid store.
It downloads the Mozilla language packs and translates locally.
This seems a great option, thanks.
