Traductio
Translates EPUB books on your Mac with TranslateGemma running in Ollama. It works offline and it's free. The result keeps its chapters and footnotes.
By Brian Rey · traductio.proj
Give it an EPUB and get the same book back in another language. It opens fine in Apple Books. Google's TranslateGemma runs locally through Ollama. Nothing leaves your Mac and there's no API bill.
Most of the work went into keeping the book intact. Italics and footnote markers become placeholders before the model sees the text. They get put back afterwards. Models are surprisingly sloppy with placeholders. So the restore step is tested against thousands of broken answers.
It's slow. A 500 page book takes about six hours on an M5 Pro so you start it before bed. If it stops halfway it picks up where it left off.
It's a CLI with a small Mac app on top. Code is on GitHub and the app is in the latest release.