WebTranslit

A transliteration tool for the web, intended to be self-hosted.

Also hosted on Github Pages: https://rafern.github.io/web-translit/

Why?

TLDR: This is for people who want to translate text that is written in a script they can read, but can't copy-paste (embedded in image/video) and can't write directly with their keyboard, while wanting to avoid Google services

Sometimes I want to translate text into English, but I can't copy-paste it due to it being embedded in an image or video. If that text uses Latin script (e.g. most romance languages), then there's no problem; I can just type the text manually into a translation tool. However, if it's written in another script, then I can't do that with my puny US keyboard.

Instead, if they're Chinese characters, I can draw them using the amazing Qhanzi webapp. If it's written in a script that I can read but not directly write with my keyboard, such as Russian Cyrillic, then I tend to use Google Translate's transliteration input method. If it's written in a script that I can't read nor write, then I would have to use Google Lens and scan the image, or do some convoluted setup where I use multilingual OCR and then translate it. I tend to just give up if I need to go that far.

Recently I switched to a self-hosted LibreTranslate instance to avoid Google services, but it doesn't do transliteration, so it doesn't fully replace Google Translate. There are already transliteration tools in the wild, but most are closed-source (therefore can't be self-hosted) or very situational (usually do one-way conversion to Latin script only, for slug generation). The most promising project was Aksharamukha, since it was open-source, supported converting to scripts other than Latin, and supported a very large number of scripts. However, it didn't fit my needs because:

• it has a focus on Indic scripts, which I haven't needed so far
• I couldn't get it working properly for Russian Cyrillic (for example neither privet nor privyet transliterate to привет, instead transliterating to привэт or привйэт)
• it doesn't do transliteration on the client-side (privacy would not be a concern since I would be self-hosting, but I would like to minimise the load on my server, and this architecture seems excessive)

Future plans

I plan on:

• adding transliteration overrides, for resolving ambiguous rules
• adding JSON package importing, for using custom rules (client-sided)
  • will also have a data viewer page (hence react-router), which lets you manage all packages, see loaded rules, create new rules on the browser, export custom rules, etc...
• adding an input method mode, which shows a popup similar to Google Translate's
• improving styling
• potentially adding dictionary-based disambiguation (e.g. kak ty should transliterate to как ты, not как тй, since ты would be in the Russian dictionary, while тй wouldn't)

Although Qhanzi is closed-source, it does a very good job which I doubt I can do better, and it's not Google, so I have no intention to replace it.

License

This project is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 only. You can find a copy of the license in the LICENSE file.