ibus-slimt-t8n

Repurposes Intelligent Input Method Bus (iBus) to intercept text entered into a field by a user, and insert translated text in it's place into any graphical application. Hence, this allows you as a user to enter text in a language you know, while the field gets the translated text. Useful when interacting with websites or agents in a foreign language.

See the software in action below:

The functionality will work in any GUI application which requests keyboard-input - browser, text-editors, mail-clients, chat-clients etc.

Setup

Setup requires the following:

• Compiler supporting C++17 or higher.
• slimt, which provides a commodity machine (most CPUs) inference engine for the neural models powering machine translation.
• ibus and GLIB 2.0 libraries (for GTK and iBus)
• yaml-cpp

Installing Dependencies On ArchLinux, dependencies can be installed by:

pacman -S ibus glib2
pacman -S yaml-cpp

For slimt, follow instructions in the repository. Package management (models) is done by slimt, and ibus-slimt-t8n is downstream to slimt. The command-line that also manages packages can be installed via PyPI and can operate standalone.

python3 -m pip install slimt
slimt ls
slimt download

Building from source Once things are in place, run the following steps to build and install ibus-slimt-t8n and associated files required for integration into ibus.

# Configure.
cmake -B build -S .

# Build
cmake --build build --target all 

# Install.
sudo cmake --build build --target install
# Install the project...
# -- Install configuration: "Release"
# -- Up-to-date: /usr/local/libexec/ibus-slimt-t8n
# -- Up-to-date: /usr/share/ibus/component/slimt-t8n.xml
# -- Up-to-date: /usr/local/share/icons/bergamot.png

First run For first time install:

1. Restart GNOME (in case the entry does not appear among available input methods).
2. Restart ibus-daemon (ibus-daemon -rXv) so the ibus parent updates to be aware of slimt-t8n.xml and is capable of spawning the ibus engine (ibus-slimt-t8n).

From time to time, you may configure ibus-slimt-t8n using the script supplied (scripts/ibus-slimt-t8n-configure.py, requires python and slimt python package), installed previously.

python3 scripts/ibus-slimt-t8n-configure.py \
    --default browsermt/en-de-tiny          \
    --verify

The generated configuration is located at $HOME/.config/ibus-slimt-t8n.yml which can be edited by hand to add your own models, as long the YAML remains valid.

Related Projects

• bergamot-translator
• translateLocally
• slimt
• lemonade (This repository is a rebrand after reducing dependencies and using slimt).