About¶

Dragomand is written and maintained by Blagovest Petrov. The idea was simple: Mozilla's translation models are good, free and run on an ordinary laptop, so every application on the Linux desktop should be able to use them, offline, without each one shipping its own copy. Development is sponsored by Vute Tech Ltd.

The same author makes the clients around the daemon: Krakoman, the KDE System Settings module, the Plasma widget, the KTextEditor plugin, the LibreOffice extension and the Qt client library. Everything is free software under the GPL, version 3 or later, and developed in the open on GitHub. Bug reports, translations and patches are welcome there.

Thanks¶

Dragomand stands on the work of many people.

• Mozilla trains and publishes the translation models, and keeps releasing new languages and better versions of the old ones. They are the models behind Firefox Translations, and Mozilla distributes them under the Mozilla Public License 2.0, so that other projects such as this one can use them. The models and the engine code come from Mozilla's translations project.
• The Bergamot project, in which the University of Edinburgh, Charles University, the University of Sheffield, the University of Tartu and Mozilla made fast machine translation run locally on ordinary computers, with funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 programme. Its bergamot-translator, which Mozilla now maintains, is the engine Dragomand runs.
• Marian, the neural machine translation framework inside that engine, together with intgemm, ruy, SentencePiece and the other libraries it builds on.
• The KDE community, for KDE Frameworks, Kirigami and Plasma, which the graphical clients are built with.

The name¶

Dragomand is dragoman + d. The d is the old Unix suffix for a daemon, as in sshd or systemd, and the command-line client keeps the root: dragomanctl. The word dragoman has more than one meaning.

A dragoman was an interpreter, translator and official guide. Dragomans worked between Turkish-, Arabic- and Persian-speaking lands and the European embassies, consulates and trading posts of the Middle East. The word is very old: it goes back to Akkadian targumannu, then Aramaic targemana, Arabic tarjumān and Turkish tercüman. It reached Europe through Greek and Italian and became the English dragoman. Bulgarian has the same word, драгоман.

In the Ottoman Empire the office carried real power. The Grand Dragoman of the Sublime Porte, often a Phanariote Greek such as Panagiotis Nikousios or Alexander Mavrocordatos, stood between the Sultan's government and the foreign powers. Several of them later became rulers of the Danubian Principalities. Western dragomans carried texts the other way: Antoine Galland, who translated the Thousand and One Nights into French, started out as a dragoman.

Dragoman is also a small town (Драгоман) in Sofia Province, western Bulgaria, close to the Serbian border and on the road and railway from Sofia to Belgrade. It is the seat of Dragoman Municipality. Nearby is the Dragoman Marsh, a karst wetland. Bulgaria's Antarctic place names include the Dragoman Glacier on Smith Island, named after the town.

A single by Stop The Schizo, an alternative band from Sofia.

The video is embedded in YouTube's privacy-enhanced mode: YouTube stores nothing about you until you press play.