abersetz

Translate entire directories of text and Markdown files using modern AI. Feed it a folder; get back a translated folder. No boilerplate, no broken formatting.

What it does

Abersetz takes a file or directory tree, detects the text format (plain text or HTML), slices large documents into chunks at natural sentence and paragraph boundaries, feeds each chunk to a translation engine, and stitches the results back together preserving the original layout.

A running vocabulary (voc) carries terms forward across chunks so "widget" in paragraph 1 still means "widget" in paragraph 47.

abersetz is a translation engine: text in, text out, through pluggable engines and providers, with chunking and vocabulary hints (voc, reference examples). Localization software is built on top of it. vexy-localizzy owns message catalogs, translation memories, catalog upgrades, QA and review, and drives abersetz engines through the stable abersetz.engine_api module. FontLab's fl10n project uses localizzy. The --tm* options below are deprecated since 1.1.0 and will be removed in 2.0.

Engines

Abersetz speaks to several translation backends through a unified selector grammar: engine[/subvariant]::provider.

The text after :: is the provider: a translation backend (tr/dt), a model id (lm), an endpoint:model spec (ll), or a model folder/file path (ml/gg). An optional subvariant before :: (e.g. ml/hy-mt2, lm/gemma) picks the prompt family for local models. The legacy engine/provider form (tr/google, ll/default) is still accepted.

LLM engines wrap text in XML tags and extract the <output> block from the response, which makes them tolerant of chatty models that add extra commentary. Dedicated translation models are the exception: abersetz recognises them by name and sends each one its native prompt instead (see below).

Dedicated translation models

The family is inferred from the model id, path or file name; force it with a subvariant (ll/hy-mt2::openai:my-finetune). What each family changes:

• Hy-MT2 uses Tencent's official English instruction (with a terminology block when a vocabulary is present), no system prompt, and the recommended sampler (temperature 0.7, top_p 0.6, top_k 20, repetition_penalty 1.05; the 30B-A3B mixture-of-experts variant uses top_p 1.0 and no top_k). Hosted tiers: OpenRouter (tencent/hy-mt2-1.8b, -7b, -30b-a3b) and Tencent Cloud TokenHub (hy-mt2-pro, -plus, -lite; set TENCENTCLOUD_API_KEY).
• TranslateGemma needs its unusual chat template: the user turn carries source_lang_code and target_lang_code. Runtimes that apply the model's own template get that structure; LM Studio and OpenAI-compatible servers get the rendered text verbatim. Decoding is greedy. Pass --from-lang; without it English is assumed.
• SalamandraTA gets the model-card prompts (plain, glossary-constrained when a vocabulary is present, markup-preserving for HTML) with English language names and greedy decoding.
• MADLAD-400 is prompted with <2de> text. llama-cpp-python's chat API cannot drive T5 models, so abersetz runs the encode/decode loop itself; the encoder window is 512 tokens, so chunks default to 300 characters.

abersetz ls gg:: and abersetz ls ml:: list the curated aliases (7b-gguf, 30b-mlx, tg-27b-4bit-mlx, madlad-10b, …). Any Hugging Face repo id also works, with repo:QUANT to pick a GGUF quantisation: gg::tencent/Hy-MT2-7B-GGUF:Q4_K_M.

Install

pip install abersetz
# or
uv pip install abersetz

Quick start

# Translate a string straight to stdout
abersetz tr es "Hello world" --engine tr::google

# Translate a single file to Spanish using Google (via translators)
abersetz tf es file.md --engine tr::google

# Translate a directory tree to Polish using an OpenAI-compatible LLM
abersetz td pl ./docs --engine ll::openai:gpt-4o-mini

# Dry run — verify paths and settings without burning API credits
abersetz td de ./docs --dry-run

# List engines, providers and models (or a subset)
abersetz ls            # engines + provider names (fast)
abersetz ls ll::       # query LLM model lists (slow; cached)
abersetz ls tr --job   # emit a job-JSON skeleton for all translators providers

Output files land in a subdirectory named after the target language by default (e.g. ./docs/pl/). Use --output to redirect them, or --Overwrite to replace files in place.

CLI reference

abersetz tr <to_lang> <text>   Translate a string to stdout
abersetz tf <to_lang> <file>   Translate a single file
abersetz td <to_lang> <dir>    Translate a directory tree

  --engine TEXT      Engine selector, e.g. tr::google, ll::openai:gpt-4o, ml/hy-mt2::/models/x
  --from-lang TEXT   Source language code (default: auto-detect)
  --output PATH      Where to write translated files (tf/td)
  --chunk-size INT   Max tokens per chunk for LLM engines
  --job JSON         A job-JSON file/string: translate with every entry at once
  --dry-run          Show what would be translated without calling any API (tf/td)

abersetz ls [SELECTOR]   List engines / providers / models (combines old engines+discover)
  --job              Emit an abersetz job-JSON skeleton instead of a table
  --force            Bypass the discovery cache for slow model lookups
  --include-paid     Include providers needing a paid API key

abersetz validate    Ping all configured engines with a test phrase

Job JSON

A job pairs selectors with languages, chunk sizes, engine params and an output suffix, so one input can be fanned across many engines (used by the benchmark):

{
  "to_lang": "pl",
  "from_lang": "en",
  "entries": [
    {"selector": "tr::google"},
    {"selector": "ll::siliconflow:Qwen/Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct", "params": {"temperature": 0.3}}
  ]
}

Configuration

Drop an abersetz.toml in your project root or ~/.config/abersetz/config.toml. Example with OpenAI:

[defaults]
engine = "ullm/openai"
to_lang = "pl"
chunk_size = 2000

[engines.ullm.options.profiles.openai]
model = "gpt-4o-mini"
base_url = ""  # leave empty for official OpenAI endpoint

[credentials]
openai = "sk-..."  # or set OPENAI_API_KEY env var

For local Hunyuan-MT on Apple Silicon:

[engines.mthy.options]
backend = "mlx"
mlx_path = "/path/to/Tencent-HunyuanMT-mlx"
max_tokens = 2048

Python API

from abersetz.pipeline import TranslatorOptions, translate_path
from pathlib import Path

results = translate_path(
    Path("./docs"),
    TranslatorOptions(engine="tr/google", to_lang="es"),
)
for r in results:
    print(f"{r.source} -> {r.destination} ({r.chunks} chunks)")

How chunking works

Translation APIs reject large inputs. LLMs have context windows. Abersetz handles both:

• HTML: sent as one piece so tags stay intact.
• Plain text / Markdown: split by the semantic-text-splitter library at sentence and paragraph boundaries, respecting the chunk_size setting. Falls back to brute-force character slicing if the library is unavailable.

Vocabulary accumulated during earlier chunks is included in the prompt for later ones (for LLM engines), so terminology stays consistent across the whole document.

License: MIT.

Uubed translation memory and Rust caching

Deprecated since 1.1.0. Translation memories moved to vexy-localizzy; the options below still work in 1.x and emit a DeprecationWarning.

Use --tm=localization.sqlite with Uubed FastEmbed and TurboQuant search. diskcache-rs persists translations and TM examples; ABERSETZ_CACHE=0 disables it. See installation, graph constraints and cache controls.

Releases and local data

./publish.sh --dry-run verifies the next release without pushing or uploading. ./publish.sh commits, tags and publishes it. See RELEASING.md for credentials, same-tag retries, dependency order and private-data exclusions.