FOSS Translation Software (Darknet Chads Unite!)

one of the most important kinds of software for connecting people all over the world is translation software and it's gotten to the point that for text communications you cannot know the language that somebody is typing at all and still be able to have a pretty good conversation with them over irc sms or on forums now chances are if you're using translation software it's probably google translate and it's in its default configuration which is not privacy respecting at all the first problem with it and this also applies to yandex translate as well and pretty much every other online translation tool is that they are not free and open source they are free as in price but they are not libre they are not free as in freedom you have no idea what yandex or google is doing with the text or speech that you put into these tools with google especially we have to assume that all of the data that we give to them either directly or indirectly and that's including metadata is tracked monetized and or given to law enforcement and governments who want it because of course google is in bed with the government and it doesn't take much imagination to see how this could be a problem like let's say for example you find a blog about a political movement that's illegal in your country and you pass it through google translate to understand what it's saying because maybe it's in another language google will be able to figure out pretty quickly what you're reading and it might alert your local government that could even be part of the business agreement that google has in order for it to operate in your country or region because remember google doesn't care about being evil they just care about profit which means they will bend the knee to these kinds of requests in order to operate in different territories or you might be interested in this false translation technology for the same reason as me which is to browse dark nets you see on tour and especially on i2p there are a lot of forums and image boards that are in different languages like russian and i think i2p is actually going to be becoming a lot more russian seeing as russia recently banned tor in their country and i2p is the second largest dark net so it makes sense that people would move to there especially since it's already pretty russian also i2p supports torrenting and we know how much russians like their torrents so yeah since i don't understand russian i wanted a more private translator without compromising my opsec and sending data across my network outside of i2p because whatever's written here is probably fairly unique and if google or anybody that does business with google has been doing some observations on itp which could just be as simple as going to web pages and downloading them there's really not much to stop you from doing that then once i put a couple of sentences from this thread into google translate or yandex or whoever is doing this observation they can pretty quickly figure out what i'm looking at and they could probably figure out that i am looking at it at that time and then also use that information that i'm giving to google in my browser to possibly figure out who i am on i2p or any other dark net for that matter so the first tool that i found was argos translate it is available from the aur if you're using arch or one of its forks on other linux distros it's typically available either as a snap or you can install it from pip which is what i did personally so this is the instructions to install it that way and this is also the github page if you're interested in looking at the code for yourself it's written in python so chances are a lot of people out there should be able to look through this and understand it so argos uses a neural engine to do its translations and that means if you have a cuda capable gpu you could use that to accelerate argos translate but so far i've found it to be fast enough for translating even a couple of paragraphs at a time so why don't we try some i don't know if i'll necessarily use this because i think some of this might have uh swear words don't want to get me demonetized let's go to heaven dot i2p so this is nice and family-friendly we'll just copy a paragraph here and then we'll put it in here oh actually i should probably show you how to set it up so by default there aren't going to be any language packs installed so you have to install them and as you can see here they go one way so i have english to russian and russian to english so you can click on download language packs and then you can go and download all the different ones here uh i think that they're all actually yeah looks like they're all just different english to a language and then a language to english so if you need something like russian to spanish then this might not be a really good option for you but there's some other tools i'm going to show you that might be able to do that and yeah we'll click russian here and you can see how quickly it translates it and this is actually pretty accurate it's not a hundred percent accurate but it's good enough to pretty much understand the gist of what's being said here we can do it with another paragraph so yeah it's it's very fast and again i'm not even using cuda that would make it even faster probably a good idea if you're going to just copy a very long body of text and just put it in here because i don't really think there's any limits to how much you can put in let's see let's try all of these yeah so it does take a little while longer when you're copying several paragraphs another popular open source translator is a pertium so this is a command line application well technically argos is a command line application as well i just showed you guys the gui front end for it and as far as i know apertium doesn't really have a gui front end i know that there are websites that are running apertium with a front end so it is possible or you could just roll your own but i didn't find an official front end for it i also could not find a working english to russian translation pack so if i run a pertium get which by the way is just another program for installing language packs because by default per tm doesn't come with any but if i run this to check and see for a russian to english there is one that's available but it didn't work for me even when i tried to manually compile it but one of the benefits of a per tm is that when you download a language pack it installs support for it in both directions and might even include different dialects like uk and american english like if i do a pertium l to list what i have you can see that i currently have let's see this is english to spanish spanish to english and spanish to american english and that was all just installed when i did i think it was the en2es language pack so it came with all three of those and to actually show you how podium works i can just do something as simple as this so i'm echoing this sentence will be translated to spanish and then piping that into a podium translating uh english to spanish and then boom we get the translation right there i will be honest with you these translation programs i've showed you so far are not as good as google translate or yandex translate especially not as good as yandex for russian to english which i've heard is even better than google translates and i'd have to guess that the reason for this is that big companies are obviously supporting those systems they put a lot of money into them probably hired language experts for different languages to help with development and you know working out different kinks that a computer probably wouldn't be able to figure out and all of the data that they've put into them probably helps a lot with those apps too like if you know a particular translation that google or yandex is doing wrong you can report it to them and improve it and the millions of people who have used these services over the years probably billions in google's case they've really helped it become a whole lot better so i'll leave you with a way to use these services with slightly better opsec so the obvious move is to just use tor but the problem with this approach is that yandex and google translate they both require javascript to be enabled in order for them to work and typically that's not something you want to be enabling when you are using the tor browser but luckily there are ways to use these translation services offline uh at least on android you can download the google translate app or the yandex translate app and then you're able to download language packs for use offline so it'll let you put text into them and then you can translate when you're not connected to wi-fi even when your phone is in airplane mode but i know that that might still be a little bit annoying of a setup because then you have to figure out how to get information from your computer over to your phone uh there are some ways to do that but it's extra steps that you have to take so overall i think that the best way to do translations on a linux machine would be to use dialect it is a gnome application which i know turns a lot of people off but it is open source it's gpl3 and it works offline so it lets you use the google trans api which is an unofficial google translate api that i believe is written in python so you can pretty much still get google translate levels of results with this without having to deal with any spookiness at all so let me show you how that works uh let's see here's i2p so we'll go back to this and i guess we'll just have to let a russian confirm since uh you know i obviously don't speak russian but we can just copy this and put it into dialect and then translate and let me show you that it is using um offline so live translation the is not on so it's not actually sending anything to any other servers i even tested it with my ethernet turned off so it definitely is not sending anything anywhere it's working offline so i would say that overall this is the best option again if you don't mind using a gnome application but i still showed you some different applications different ways to do this just to promote competition maybe one will become better than dialect in the future but that's it for this video guys like and contact the algorithm have a great rest of your day

Channel: Mental Outlaw

Views: 34,013

Keywords: Mental Outlaw, mental, outlaw, Argos Translate, Apertium, dialect, free software, foss, linux translation apps, google translate linux, google granslate open source, open source google translate, linux

Id: CEsaGdGkTDk

Length: 12min 1sec (721 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 18 2021