Google Translate is a multilingual Neural Machine Translation service developed by Google to translate text, documents and websites from one language into another. It offers a website interface, a mobile app for Android and iOS, as well as an API that helps developers build browser extensions and software applications.
Google Translate is proprietary software. Want to move away from Google? Step forward Pot.
Pot is a cross-platform translator application that offers translation by selection and input. It supports clipboard listening, screenshot optical character recognition, and screenshot translation.
It’s written mainly in JavaScript and published under an open source license.
Installation
I tested Pot using Ubuntu 23.10 under GNOME and X11. The project provides a Debian/Ubuntu package which installs with no fuss and bother.
If there’s not a distro-specific package available for you, the project also offers an AppImage.
AppImage is a universal software format for distributing portable software on Linux without needing superuser permissions to install the application.
AppImage doesn’t really install software. It’s a compressed image with all the dependencies and libraries needed to run the desired software. To run the software, you download the AppImage file, make it executable, and run the file.
Next page: Page 2 – In Operation and Summary
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction and Installation
Page 2 – In Operation and Summary
This looks really promising, but for Ubuntu 22.04.03 with Unity DE Xorg session it doesn’t feel very stable yet: translation window refuses to open sometimes (I have not yet identified the conditions when it does or doesn’t open), and TTS didn’t work for me.