Funding open language preservation
Open, free, and sustainable is a hard trio. A few words on who funds this work, why we keep it cheap on purpose, and what 'archived but alive' means.
People assume the hard part of a project like this is the AI. It isn't. The hard part is keeping something open and free running for years without a business model that quietly pushes you to close it.
Who supports us
This work is supported by the Klaus Tschira Foundation via the Alumnode program — a community and funding network for early-career researchers. That backing is what let us compile the corpus, train and open-source the first models, and start building the voice platform without putting any of it behind a paywall.
Cheap on purpose
We engineer for near-zero running cost, because cost is what kills open projects. The translation service is built to run on free-tier infrastructure and spare CPU machines, with a more powerful node taking over only when one happens to be online. That's not a compromise we're embarrassed by; it's the design. A preservation archive has to be affordable enough to outlive its founders' attention.
Archived but alive
You'll see us describe the translator as "archived." We mean it in the museum sense, not the deleted sense: the work is finished enough to be permanent, kept running on minimal resources, ready to wake up and serve anyone who needs it — while our active energy moves to the voice corpus.
Open. Free. Sustainable. Pick three, the saying goes you can't — but with the right funding and stubbornly cheap engineering, you can get close.