Tolmach

Tolmach translates complete books for readers and translators who need consistent terminology across chapters. It uses local LLMs through Ollama, with optional Ollama Cloud models.

• Book-wide glossary: Review proposed translations for characters, places and terms, with rules for fixed wording, grammatical variation and preferred translations.
• Checked refinements: A separate model checks suggested edits against the original text before they reach the translation, while quality checks flag omissions, changed numbers, repetition and glossary errors.
• Side-by-side review: Compare the source, first draft and editable final text, filter passages that need attention and consider alternative translations.
• Book import and export: Import TXT, EPUB, PDF or DOCX and export TXT, PDF or EPUB; PDF processing extracts text rather than preserving images or page layout, and scanned PDFs need OCR first.
• Resumable work: Pause translation, resume after a restart and reopen saved jobs without repeating completed sections.

The app runs through a local browser interface on macOS, Windows and Linux. Local models keep book text on your computer; Ollama Cloud models send text to Ollama's servers. Optional cloud glossary verification sends the glossary and language pair, rather than the book.

Tolmach is open source under AGPL-3.0. It requires Ollama and enough memory and disk space for the selected models, including TranslateGemma and Gemma. Translation supports English, Russian, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Turkish. Quality depends on the models, and the resulting text still needs proofreading.