Ceylan
A private translator for literary work, made on a small Mac in Amsterdam Noord.
SHA-256
36152b4544c74772c86eb5c5afc81bfb61e8c511fc4cc9fba0b8f7eb4c3b1764
What it is
Ceylan is a macOS app for translating long, careful texts. It runs entirely on your Mac — your words never leave your device, never touch a cloud, never train someone else's model.
It was built for one person first: a literary translator from Amsterdam Zuid (whose name is a synonym for Ceylan) who didn't want her drafts of unpublished writing pasted into anyone's web form. From that small starting point grew the rest.
Why it exists
Most translation tools today are good at speed and bad at intimacy. They want your text, your patterns, your edits — and quietly turn them into training data, ad signals, or worse.
Literary work deserves better. A poem, a short story, an essay that hasn't yet been read by another human — that should not be the second-best customer of a free API.
Ceylan starts from the opposite premise: your text is yours. It stays on this Mac, in this room, with you.
How it works
Three on-device engines, free to mix:
- Apple Translation — Apple's built-in translator, instant, available offline once language packs are downloaded. Best for first drafts and short passages.
- MLX models — Apple's own ML framework runs translation-tuned models (TranslateGemma, Qwen) locally on Apple Silicon. Better literary nuance than Apple Translation.
- Ollama — for power users who already run Ollama, Ceylan plugs into local models like aya-expanse. Heaviest, most nuanced, slowest.
Switch engines per passage. None of them call out to the internet during translation.
For literary work
Ceylan was shaped around the rhythms of actual translation:
- Side-by-side Review mode aligns source and translation paragraph by paragraph, so you can refine without losing your place.
- Glossary locks character names and recurring terms ("Ayşe → Ayşe", "Mehmet → Mike") across every paragraph, every session.
- History keeps every translation locally, searchable, never synced.
- Word and character counts update live, per chunk, like a writer's status bar.
- Pages, Word, RTF, Markdown import and export — meet the file you already have.
- Turkish, Dutch, English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Russian, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, Korean — sixteen languages, paired any direction.
Privacy in one paragraph
No analytics. No telemetry. No accounts. No internet calls during translation. Model downloads (one-time) go directly to Hugging Face or Ollama's registry. Everything else lives in ~/Library/Application Support/Ceylan/ on your own machine. If you delete the app, your work goes with it. That's the whole story.
SHA-256
36152b4544c74772c86eb5c5afc81bfb61e8c511fc4cc9fba0b8f7eb4c3b1764
For everyone whose drafts deserve a quieter desk