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what is ollama-translate-alfred fr?

ncat-yan/ollama-translate-alfred — explained in plain English

Analysis updated 2026-05-18

2PythonAudience · generalComplexity · 2/5LicenseSetup · moderate

tl;dr

An Alfred workflow for macOS that translates text and looks up English words using a locally running Ollama AI model, with no cloud service involved.

vibe map

mindmap
  root((ollama-translate-alfred))
    What it does
      Translates selected or copied text
      Looks up English word definitions
      Runs fully on your Mac
    Tech stack
      Python
      Alfred workflow
      Ollama
      TranslateGemma model
    Use cases
      Translate clipboard text instantly
      Look up an English word's meaning
      Translate selected text on any Mac app
    Audience
      macOS power users
      Bilingual Chinese English users
    Setup
      Needs Alfred Powerpack
      Needs Ollama installed

Code map

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filefunction / class

what do people make with this?

VIBE 1

Translate a word or sentence without leaving your keyboard, using a hotkey inside Alfred.

VIBE 2

Look up an English word's Chinese meaning using the macOS dictionary or an offline dictionary.

VIBE 3

Translate longer selected passages of text privately, without sending them to a cloud service.

what's the stack?

PythonOllamaAlfred

how it stacks up fr

ncat-yan/ollama-translate-alfred0-bingwu-0/live-interpreter010zx00x1/faresnipe
Stars222
LanguagePythonPythonPython
Setup difficultymoderatemoderateeasy
Complexity2/52/52/5
Audiencegeneralgeneralgeneral

Figures from each repo's GitHub metadata at analysis time.

how do i run it?

Difficulty · moderate time til it works · 30min

Requires Alfred's paid Powerpack plus a local Ollama install and downloaded model.

Use freely for any purpose, including commercial use, as long as you keep the copyright notice.

in plain english

ollama-translate-alfred is a workflow for Alfred, a macOS launcher app, that lets you look up English words and translate text entirely on your own computer instead of sending it to a cloud translation service. By default it translates other languages into Simplified Chinese and translates Chinese into English. When you type a single English word, it first checks the built in macOS dictionary, then an optional offline Chinese English dictionary called ECDICT, and only falls back to the local Ollama AI model if neither has an answer. For longer text, it sends the content to a local Ollama installation running a translation model called TranslateGemma, breaking long passages into chunks of about 1,200 tokens so they translate cleanly. You can trigger it a few ways: typing a keyword followed by a word or phrase, translating whatever is currently on your clipboard, translating text you have selected anywhere on macOS through a hotkey or through Alfred's Universal Actions, then copying, pasting, or viewing the full translation in a larger text view. Setup requires macOS, Alfred 5 with its paid Powerpack upgrade, and Ollama installed locally, plus downloading the translation model through Ollama itself. Settings like which model to use, the chunk size, and timeouts can all be adjusted inside Alfred's workflow configuration screen. The project includes its own build script, a test suite, and a written comparison of two different sizes of the TranslateGemma model. Because everything runs locally through Ollama, no text you translate is sent to an outside company, which matters if you are translating anything private. The project is released under the MIT license, with a separate notice file covering the license of the bundled ECDICT dictionary data.

prompts (copy fr)

prompt 1
Walk me through installing Alfred, Ollama, and this workflow so I can start translating text on my Mac.
prompt 2
Explain how to change the default translation model or the OLLAMA_HOST setting in this workflow's configuration.
prompt 3
Show me how the chunking logic in translate.py splits long text before sending it to Ollama.
prompt 4
Help me write a test using this project's unittest setup to check the word lookup order works correctly.

Frequently asked questions

what is ollama-translate-alfred fr?

An Alfred workflow for macOS that translates text and looks up English words using a locally running Ollama AI model, with no cloud service involved.

What language is ollama-translate-alfred written in?

Mainly Python. The stack also includes Python, Ollama, Alfred.

What license does ollama-translate-alfred use?

Use freely for any purpose, including commercial use, as long as you keep the copyright notice.

How hard is ollama-translate-alfred to set up?

Setup difficulty is rated moderate, with roughly 30min to a first successful run.

Who is ollama-translate-alfred for?

Mainly general.

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This repo across BitVibe Labs

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