u/MiuraDude

Hi everybody,

my name is Leo and I recently created Fink Translate as an alternative to tools such as Google Translate and also DeepL and LLMs. Hopefully it's alright for me to share and self-promote this here.

I started working on this about 6 month ago, I love the domain of machine translation and wanted to understand more about it. I come from a programming and data science background, but also love languages in general.

Maybe about the tool itself:

It is compeletey hosted in the EU. The website and the app itself is hosted on Hetzner in Helsinki and Nürnberg, and I use the models of Mistral AI (with data opt-out) for the actual translation stuff. For things like Mail I use TutaNota, Ionos for DNS and Polar for payments (which is a swedish company). Some services are hard to avoid being from the US, such as VISA/ Mastercard for payments or, well, Reddit for actually comunicating the tool. Being "US-free" feels bascially impossible, but I try my best to avoid US-tech.
The tool is based on some research papers (such as this and this one) and includes improvements using so called MQM annotations, to more quickly improve and validate translations.
Currently, there are around 15 languages available. I used this paper to validate which languages the Mistral AI LLMs are actually good for. Personally, I use the tool for English, Japanese and Italian mostly. In the future, I would love to self-host the models, but at the moment, this is too expensive for me.

Maybe you think "So the tool uses LLMs, what is the benefit of using Fink?"

Which is a totally valid question, and actually, LLMs are fine for many translation tasks. What I noticed when doing translations like this though: It is really tedious to verify and improve translations via a chat interface. Personally, I create a lot of translations for EN -> JP, and Japanese being a very high context language, it is super easy to miscommunicate things. Checking if formality or context is presented correctly always took me a long time, so I tried to structure this process with Fink.

Because of this, Fink has a "quality check" feature, that allows you to check a translation if it is actually suitable for the target audience, if it is structually coherent with other texts (via a style guide) and if the formality is ok. You can also directly see a back-translation, which helps verify the translation, even if you don't speak the language. For me, instead of writing back and forth with an LLM for 10 minutes to improve a translation, it now takes me just a couple of minutes from start to finish.

The product is still in an early stage, and I would love to get feedback (positive and negative alike) on how well it works for other people. I am sure I missed like a thousand things, translation is a complex topic.

There is a payed tier, but if you see yourself wanting to use it more, just shoot me a message. I'll gladly provide you with more credits. As a disclaimer: I used LLMs to help me with building the tool, but it's not something that was built over night or simply vibe coded with a prompt. I've put a lot of time and thoughts into it to improve and try build something that people might actually want to use.

Maybe also some words on DeepL, them being a EU-based translation company: They have been criticised a lot recently as they now use AWS as a service provider. I personally still think they are a great company and important for the European tech ecosystem. I at least hope to see them succeed, and maybe move away from AWS again in the future.

You can check out Fink here: https://fink-translate.com/

There is also a demo video you can check out here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4FQnLh01NI

If you have any questions, let me know.

- Leo

Given the amount of resources of Mistral, it seems like a miracle that they are still relevant

Le chaton fat almost crashed HuggingFace, CTO in shambles