My Local Translator

User Manual

Overview

My Local Translator is a single-page tool that performs machine translation locally using transformers.js. When you translate for the first time with a given engine, the model weights are downloaded once from the Hugging Face Hub and then cached in your browser, so subsequent translations work offline. The text you enter, the files you open, and the translations produced never leave your device — there is no server involved.

Getting Started

Choosing a direction

Pick a translation direction from the Direction menu (e.g. English → French). Each direction is a separate, lightweight Opus-MT model (~40–80 MB), downloaded once and then cached.
Use the ⇄ button to flip to the reverse direction when one is available (e.g. switch English → French to French → English).

Entering text

Type or paste directly into the Source pane on the left.
Open a file — click 📂 Open file (or press Ctrl/Cmd + O) and pick a .txt, .md, .pdf or .docx file.
Drag & drop a file straight onto the Source pane.

Translating

Click Translate (or press Ctrl/Cmd + Enter).
The status bar shows model-download progress on first use, then per-segment progress as it works.
Long text is split into segments automatically and translated in order; line and paragraph breaks are kept.

Saving the result

Copy — copies the full translation to your clipboard.
Download .txt — saves the translation as translation.txt.

First-run tip: the first translation in a given direction needs an internet connection to download that model (~40–80 MB). After that it is cached in your browser and works offline.

The Toolbar

Control	Action
Direction	Selects the translation direction (a fixed-pair Opus-MT model). Your choice is remembered.
⇄ Swap	Switches to the reverse direction when one is available.
📂 Open file	Opens a text, Markdown, PDF or Word file and loads its text into the Source pane.
Translate	Translates the Source text into the Translation pane.
Clear	Empties both panes.
Copy / Download .txt	Copies or saves the translation.

Languages & Directions

The app uses Helsinki-NLP's Opus-MT models — small, fast translators each trained for one direction. It ships with the most widely used directions to and from English: French, German, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Russian, Chinese and Arabic, in both directions.

Opus-MT models are direction-specific. To translate the other way, pick the reverse direction from the menu, or use the ⇄ button.

Working with Documents

PDF text is extracted with pdf.js and Word text with mammoth.js. Only the text is extracted — original layout, images, tables and styling are not preserved. The translation is plain text that you can copy or download as .txt.

Scanned/image-only PDFs contain no selectable text, so nothing can be extracted from them. Use a PDF with real text.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Shortcut	Action
`Ctrl/Cmd + Enter`	Translate
`Ctrl/Cmd + O`	Open file

Privacy

My Local Translator processes everything locally in your browser. No data is transmitted to any server — not the text you type, not the files you open, not the translations produced. The only network activity is the one-time download of model weights from the Hugging Face Hub (and the CDN script files), after which everything is cached and runs offline. Your engine and language choices are stored in localStorage on your device.

Supported File Types

.txt · .md · .pdf · .docx

Troubleshooting

"Could not load model" — you need an internet connection the first time you use a direction. Check your connection and try again.
Translation is slow — models run on the CPU. The first run in a direction also includes the one-time download; later runs are faster. Translating shorter passages helps.
Nothing extracted from a PDF — it is likely a scanned image with no text layer.

About this tool

Technologies used:

Built with:

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