[znnajdla]

Some tasks don’t require SOTA models. For translating small texts I use Gemma 4 on my iPhone because it’s faster and better than Apple Translate or Google Translate and works offline. Also if you can break down certain tasks like JSON healing into small focused coding tasks then local models are useful

[netdevphoenix]

> For translating small texts I use Gemma 4 on my iPhone because it’s faster and better than Apple Translate or Google Translate and works offline.

What does better mean here? Does it handle formal vs informal speech? Idiomatic expressions? Regional variances (like American vs British English)? These are areas where Google Translate is weak.

How fast are we talking here (including initial loading times) and what's the impact on your phone battery? Also, what iPhone do you have?

I am really interested in this application hence my questions.

[root_axis]

How does that work? Wouldn't it be slow loading the weights into memory every time you launch it?

[theshrike79]

I'm guessing they're not using it as a word dictionary, but rather translating longer texts where the time to load the model isn't a significant issue.

[kaliqt]

Is it really better? In which languages?

[deaux]

Yes it is and has been for a very long time, it has been years now. Gemini 1.5 Pro is when LLM translations started significantly outperforming non-LLM machine translation, and that came out over 2 years ago.

Ever since then Google models have been the strongest at translation across the board, so it's no surprise Gemma 4 does well. Gemini 3 Flash is better at translation than any Claude or GPT model. OpenAI models have always been weakest at it, continuing to this day. It's quite interesting how these characteristics have stayed stable over time and many model versions.

I'm primarily talking about non-trivial language pairs, something like English<>Spanish is so "easy" now it's hard to distinguish the strong models.

[homebrewer]

I've been using gemma4 for translating Mongolian to English. It runs circles around Google Translate for that language pair, it's not even close.

[znnajdla]

I translate texts between Ukrainian, Russian and English dozens of times daily. The LLM translation is not only better, it's also refineable, you can chat with the AI to make changes to what you meant.

[oktoberpaard]

Do you use E2B or E4B?