LibreTranslate
Machine translation with no Google, no Azure, no per-character billing, and no text leaving
your infrastructure: LibreTranslate is a free, open-source translation API that runs entirely
on your own server. The engine underneath is Argos Translate, which runs OpenNMT neural models
with SentencePiece tokenization and Stanza sentence-boundary detection, all offline. Models
install as portable .argosmodel packages covering dozens of languages - English, Spanish,
French, German, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Arabic, Hindi, Portuguese, and many more - and
Argos handles automatic pivoting: with es-to-en and en-to-fr installed, it chains them to
translate es-to-fr without a direct model. The API is a straightforward HTTP POST to
/translate with source and target language codes, returning JSON - simple enough that the
ecosystem has clients in every major language and integrations across tools like Weblate and
Mastodon. Beyond plain text it translates HTML while preserving markup and handles whole file
uploads (documents in, translated documents out), plus automatic language detection when the
source is unknown. A clean bundled web UI serves interactive translation for end users, and
optional API keys with rate limits control access. AGPL-licensed and trainable with custom
models, it is the standard answer when translation must be private, unmetered, and
self-contained - GDPR-sensitive text never touches a third party.
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