Blog
Three new language packs: Ukrainian, Polish and Czech
Ukrainian shipped because a learner pointed out that reading Ukrainian under the Russian pack mistranslates words and cuts others in half. Polish and Czech followed. What each pack measures, and where the gaps still are.
Import YouTube transcripts and podcasts
Two new ways to bring native audio and video into Lector: a YouTube video's transcript with clickable timestamps, or a podcast you read along to as it plays — both with full word-state tracking and vocabulary mining.
Which local LLM translates best? A reproducible eval
A reproducible benchmark of 24 on-device, self-hosted, and cloud models translating into English — with the low-resource case (Afrikaans) front and centre. The headline: a local 18 GB model ties frontier cloud on Afrikaans→English.
What I learned by OCRing an Afrikaans dictionary
Digitising a 346-page print dictionary to widen Lector's offline vocabulary — why a smaller book beat a bigger wordlist, what OCR does to a language built on diacritics, and what the data says about Afrikaans.
Run translations locally with LM Studio
Point Lector's translation agent at a local LLM through LM Studio's OpenAI-compatible API — no API keys, no cloud. Setup, the Docker networking gotcha, and headless config.