Argos Translate
A Python library and command-line tool for offline neural machine translation using downloadable language packages
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| + | Offline Translation | Performs neural machine translation entirely on-device once a language package is installed, allowing translation without an internet connection and keeping text off remote servers. |
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| + | Automatic Language Pivoting | Chains together intermediate installed language pairs (e.g. es→en→fr) when a direct pair isn’t installed, enabling translation between many more language combinations without downloading every pair individually with a slight likely loss in translation quality. |
| + | Python Library API | Exposes package management and translation through the argostranslate Python module, allowing developers to embed offline translation directly inside their own applications. |
| + | Command-Line Interface | Provides the argos-translate and argospm command-line tools for translating text and managing language packages, enabling scripted or batch translation workflows without a GUI. |
| + | GPU Acceleration | Offloads inference to a CUDA-capable GPU via the ARGOS_DEVICE_TYPE environment variable and CTranslate2’s device backend, speeding up translation throughput on supported hardware. |
| + | Downloadable Language Packages | Distributes each language pair as a separate .argosmodel package, allowing users to install only the languages they need instead of a single large bundled model set. |
| + | HTML and File Translation Extensions | Integrates with companion libraries such as translate-html and argos-translate-files, enabling structured documents and web pages to be translated in place rather than as plain text only. |
| + | Graphical User Interface | Offers a separate PyQt-based desktop GUI for installing packages and translating text, giving non-technical users a point-and-click alternative to the library or CLI. |
| - | Bounded Input Length Per Pass | The underlying seq2seq models process roughly 150 tokens at a time, requiring text to be split into sentences before translation and limiting single-pass accuracy on long, unsegmented input. |
...2 more features/limitations. Contact us to get a complete list of features and system requirements.
Platform
Desktop
Language
Python
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System Requirements
| # | Minimum |
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| 1 |
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| # | Minimum |
|---|---|
| 1 | Python 3.5 or higher |
| # | Minimum |
|---|---|
| 1 | Python 3.5 or higher |
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Categories
Alternatives
Notes
- A hosted/self-hosted web app and API built on top of Argos Translate is available as LibreTranslate.
- Windows users should expect to build the CTranslate2 dependency from source, since only Linux and macOS binaries are officially distributed.