File: gettext.info,  Node: spit Invocation,  Prev: msgpre Invocation,  Up: Pretranslating

8.3 Invoking the ‘spit’ Program
===============================

     spit [OPTION...]

   The ‘spit’ program passes its input to a Large Language Model (LLM)
instance and prints the response.  With the ‘--to’ option, it translates
its input to the specified language through a Large Language Model (LLM)
and prints the translation.

   *Warning:* The output might not be what you expect.  It might be of
the wrong form, be of poor quality, or reflect some biases.

8.3.1 Large Language Model (LLM) options
----------------------------------------

‘--species=TYPE’
     Specifies the type of Large Language Model execution engine.  The
     default and only valid value is ‘ollama’.

‘--url=URL’
     Specifies the URL of the server that runs Large Language Model
     execution engine.  For ‘ollama’, the default is
     ‘http://localhost:11434’.

‘-m MODEL’
‘--model=MODEL’
     Specifies the model to use.  This option is mandatory; no default
     exists.  The specified model must already be installed in the Large
     Language Model execution engine.

‘--to=LANGUAGE’
     Specifies the target language.  LANGUAGE may be specified as an ISO
     639 language code (such as ‘fr’ for French), as a combination of an
     ISO 639 language code and an ISO 3166 country code (such as ‘fr_CA’
     for French in Canada, or ‘zh_TW’ for traditional Chinese), or as
     the English name of a language (such as ‘French’).

     The effect of this option is to add a prompt similar to "Translate
     to LANGUAGE:".

‘--prompt=TEXT’
     Specifies the prompt to use before the input that comes from
     standard input.  It allows you to specify extra instructions for
     the LLM.

     This option overrides the ‘--to’ option.

‘--postprocess=COMMAND’
     Specifies a command to post-process the output.  This should be a
     Bourne shell command that reads from standard input and writes to
     standard output.

     For instance, the ‘ministral-3:14b’ model often emphasizes part of
     the output with ‘**’ characters.  To eliminate these markers, you
     could use the command ‘sed -e 's/[*][*]//g'’.

8.3.2 Informative output
------------------------

‘-h’
‘--help’
     Display this help and exit.

‘-V’
‘--version’
     Output version information and exit.

8.3.3 Examples
--------------

   Machine translation of a single sentence:

     $ echo 'Translate into German: "Welcome to the GNU project!"' \
         | spit --model=ministral-3:14b \
                --postprocess="sed -e 's/[*][*]//g'"
     "Willkommen zum GNU-Projekt!"

The perfect translation would be ‘"Willkommen beim GNU-Projekt!"’.  You
can see: some manual adjustment after the machine translation is needed.