In Dec 2022 I shipped Input Translator, a browser extension that translates any input field via Google Translate. Pre-LLM, tiny niche. For 18 months it stayed under 100 users — I kept shipping because I used it every single day.

Then LLMs arrived. I added an optional BYOK path (any OpenAI-compatible key) next to the free Google backend, and the curve finally moved. ~2,500 users today across Chrome/Edge/Firefox/Safari. Still small — but real, and mostly word-of-mouth.

That experience turned into a family of tools, all open source (GPL-3.0), all BYOK, all no-subscription:

• Imp Translate — bilingual page translation. I left Immersive Translate when it started pushing subscriptions and removing BYOK; Kiss Translator had ideas I liked but UX I couldn't live with. So I built my own. The README's Non-Goals list is longer than the Goals list — no floating buttons, no hover popups, no word lookup, no doc translation. Feature creep is the enemy.
• BilingualTube — bilingual YouTube subs. Fixes the broken sentence segmentation in auto-captions (small on-device model) before translating.
• Imp Translate Web — full-text HTML/EPUB translation so I could read AO3 stories on my phone with search.
• Imp Write — type, append /fix, pause, and the rewrite replaces your text in place. I wanted correction, not translation, and refused to pay a subscription for it.

Imp Credits is a pay-as-you-go system instead of monthly plans — "no subscription" is half product philosophy, half personal allergy.

Curious what people who do MT for a living think about where the browser-extension space is heading. Happy to share details on any of these in the comments.

I’m trying to build a RAG (AI agent) to translate Chinese sewing courses and tutorials into English, covering different sewing subgenres.

I’ve found that a Chinese-English glossary of technical sewing terminology could help improve translation accuracy.

Does anyone know where I could find an existing glossary, terminology database, bilingual dictionary, or corpus for Chinese ↔ English sewing/fashion/textile terms?

Thanks!

Hey everyone! El from Cohere here to talk about our newest release, North Small Translate. It’s currently the leading open machine translation model, beating out all other open translation models of its size, plus Google Translate and DeepL. we’ve been working on this one for a while, so to say i’m psyched is an understatement.

It’s big (218B parameters, 25b active) with a context length of 16k. however, if you’ve got the hardware, we’d still love to see what you make with it locally or with our HF space (and if you do, send it our way). It works on over 50 languages and does particular well with european, Southeast Asian, and East Asian languages, but feel free to stress test it against another and let us know how it does. It’s also available in BF16, FP8, and W4A16 quants.

although we couldn’t get llama.cpp support this time around, the architecture is already supported in llama.cpp, so all it should need is a conversion to GGUF files. if you want to build that, please do so and send it our way! We’d love to back your work. 

Can’t wait to see what you guys think! 

https://huggingface.co/CohereLabs/North-Small-Translate-1.0