villares / markdown_translation

A script and Docker environment for running automated open source translations of batches of Markdown files using LibreTranslate

Open source machine translation for Markdown files

A script and Docker environment for running automated open source machine translations of batches of Markdown files, suitable for quickly providing translations for Hugo websites or Flask web applications. This uses LibreTranslate, a free and open source machine translation API initiated as a submodule to this repository: https://github.com/LibreTranslate/LibreTranslate.

As with all machine translations, the outputted translation may be imperfect and ideally all translations should be checked by a human translator.

LibreTranslate API

To start the LibreTranslate server for accessing the API, first ensure Docker is installed. Then simply run

./startLibreTranslate.sh

to run LibreTranslate's own run.sh Bash script for bring the Docker container up. You can then access the locally running LibreTranslate server at http://localhost:5000.

Python script

To run the Python script for machine translation of batches of Markdown files, ensure that Python is installed and run

pip install -r requirements.txt

to install required Python libraries.

Adjust the variables in translate.py to point to whatever directory contains the Markdown files you want translated. By default the script looks at a base directory and looks for a 'en' subdirectory containing English language Markdown files. Set the output_language variable to the language you wish to translate into using the language's two-letter ISO 639-1 code.

Then run

python3 ./translate.py

This will output translated Markdown files into a subdirectory in the base directory using the two-letter ISO 639-1 code for the output language. It will also replicate any directory structure present in the input directory.