---

name: "translation" description: "Guides Argos Translate text translation through Python APIs, the argos-translate CLI, runtime settings, sentence-boundary modes, and translation troubleshooting." disable-model-invocation: true metadata: disco-role: operating license: MIT

Translation Workflows

Use this sub-skill when the user wants to translate text, inspect installed languages, route through translate APIs, use argos-translate, tune runtime translation settings, or debug translation failures.

Scope

This sub-skill owns:

• Python translation with argostranslate.translate.
• CLI translation with argos-translate.
• Installed language lookup and translation-object selection.
• Device, compute, chunking, and sentence-boundary settings that affect translation runtime.
• Optional remote provider notes for LibreTranslate/OpenAI-backed paths.
• Translation-specific troubleshooting.

Route package index updates, package installation/removal, and .argosmodel archive inspection to ../package-management/ first.

Read these first

• references/workflows.md — step-by-step Python and CLI translation workflows.
• references/troubleshooting.md — translation-specific failure modes and recovery.
• ../../references/api-reference.md — verified API objects and signatures.
• ../../references/cli-reference.md — exact CLI flags and command behavior.
• ../../references/configuration.md — environment variables, config files, device selection, and SBD modes.
• ../../references/troubleshooting.md — cross-cutting import, package, optional backend, and config failures.

Minimal decision flow

1. Confirm the package imports:

   python scripts/check_runtime.py
   

2. Confirm the required source and target languages are installed:

   from argostranslate import translate
   print([(lang.code, lang.name) for lang in translate.get_installed_languages()])
   

3. If either language or the language pair is missing, switch to ../package-management/ and install the required package.

4. Use Python API or CLI translation only after the language-pair package exists.

5. Set runtime variables such as ARGOS_DEVICE_TYPE and ARGOS_CHUNK_TYPE before importing translation modules in a long-running process.

Python translation route

Use the direct helper when a package exists:

from argostranslate import translate

print(translate.translate("Hello world", "en", "es"))

Use object-level APIs when you need to inspect languages, pivot paths, or translation classes:

from argostranslate import translate

languages = {lang.code: lang for lang in translate.get_installed_languages()}
from_lang = languages["en"]
to_lang = languages["es"]
translation = from_lang.get_translation(to_lang)
print(translation.translate("Hello world"))

CLI translation route

Use the installed CLI command:

argos-translate --from-lang en --to-lang es "Hello world"
echo "Text to translate" | argos-translate -f en -t es

Do not rely on older --from / --to aliases unless verified in the target environment. Current installed help uses --from-lang / --to-lang and -f / -t.

Runtime-setting route

Read ../../references/configuration.md before changing:

• ARGOS_DEVICE_TYPE for CPU/CUDA runtime.
• ARGOS_COMPUTE_TYPE, ARGOS_BATCH_SIZE, and thread settings for CTranslate2 behavior.
• ARGOS_CHUNK_TYPE for MiniSBD, SpaCy, or Stanza sentence splitting.
• ARGOS_MODEL_PROVIDER for non-default remote provider paths.

CUDA, Stanza, SpaCy downloads, and remote provider paths are optional runtime capabilities. Do not present them as verified unless the target environment has been explicitly tested.

Advanced API route

Use ../../references/api-reference.md for:

• IdentityTranslation, CompositeTranslation, and CachedTranslation.
• RemoteTranslation / LibreTranslate API adapter.
• FewShotTranslation and OpenAI adapter.
• tags.translate_tags() for simple tag-tree preservation.
• sbd sentencizer classes and tokenizer details.

Native verification anchors

The source repository's safe translation unit-test anchor is tests/test_translate.py. End-to-end language-pair tests depend on installed model packages and may skip or require network/package setup; do not treat those skips as proof that translation works.