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While this list was designed to help people wanting to move off US-based services, it's also helpful for those of us just trying to get off Google. One of the very few Google services I still used was Google translate, and now I have an alternative.
(I thought DeepL looked good, but there are four other choices and I'm open to other suggestions.)
I'm not doing any heavy translation work; I just sometimes want to translate something I see online, purely for my own curiosity.
@jeridansky For a decent subset of languages you can also use the on-device translation models that Apple provides; they are quite good, and improving, and nothing ever leaves your device for the translation operation?
@sindarina Thank you — I totally forgot that Apple does this!
These instructions for my Mac (where I normally want to do translations) work fine as long as I remember it's control-click to get to the translate function:
https://support.apple.com/en-lamr/guide/mac-help/mchldd8b3c15/mac
@jeridansky @RaffKarva Fairslator is very useful too. It extends DeepL, Google and Microsoft to take account of gender, number and forms of address. e.g. The German singular informal 'du' or formal 'Sie'. https://www.fairslator.com/
One of the reasons I use #Vivaldi as my main browser is that it has built-in translation, either for selected text or for entire websites. It works really well, and it can even be set to translate languages of your choice automatically.
(And if you didn't already know, the company is Icelandic.)
@EverydayMoggie @RaffKarva As someone using a Mac and an iPhone, Vivaldi is my backup browser, after Safari. And as @sindarina reminded me, Apple has built-in translation (which I had never used and totally forgot about) so I don’t really need another service for most languages.
But that’s still good to know about Vivaldi, which seems pretty nice.