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Machine translations

Hypha has the ability to utilize argostranslate for machine translations of submitted application content. This is disabled by default and the dependencies are not installed to prevent unneeded bloat due to PyTorch's large language models.

Installing dependencies

As referenced in the production deployment guide, it is required to install the dependencies needed for machine translation dependencies via

python3 -m pip install -r requirements/translate.txt

or, if you are on a platform that does not support GPU processing:

python3 -m pip install -r requirements/translate-cpu.txt

This requirements file will specifically attempt to install the CPU version of PyTorch if available on the detected platform to play better with heroku (doesn't support GPU processing) and to minimize package bloat (CPU package is ~300MB less than the normal GPU). Depending on your use case, you may want to adjust this.

Installing languages

Argostranslate handles translations via its own packages—e.g., Arabic → English translation is one package, while English → Arabic is another.

You can install/uninstall these packages using the management commands install_languages and uninstall_languages, respectively. The format for specifying a package is <from language code>_<to language code>. For example, to install the Arabic → English and French → English packages:

python3 manage.py install_languages ar_en fr_en

Additional options

The install_languages command supports several options for flexibility:

  • Install all available packages: 

    python3 manage.py install_languages --all

    ⚠️ This may install many packages and consume significant disk space.

  • Interactively select packages: 

    python3 manage.py install_languages --select
    This will present a numbered list of available language packages for you to choose from.

  • Skip confirmation prompts: 

    python3 manage.py install_languages ar_en --noinput
    This will install the specified packages without asking for confirmation.

You can combine these options as needed. For example, to interactively select packages and skip confirmation:

python3 manage.py install_languages --select --noinput

Enabling on the system

To enable machine translations on an instance, the proper configuration variables need to be set. These can be found in the configuration options