easyread

EasyRead translates English academic papers into comfortable Chinese, page by page, with the original alongside and equations re-typeset so they render properly. You can highlight, take notes, ask an AI about the paper, and export citations as GB/T 7714, APA or BibTeX. It can also translate into Japanese, Korean, Spanish, French, German and Italian. MIT licensed.

It runs locally: download an installer, or run from source with Python 3.10+. You pick the translation engine: your Claude Code or Codex subscription (no API key), a paid API like DeepSeek or OpenAI, a free tier like Gemini or Groq, or a fully offline local model through Ollama. Paper text goes to whichever model you choose, and API keys sit in a plaintext config file on disk.

Chinese-speaking grad students and researchers reading English literature are the audience, and for them it's free beyond model costs, which the project puts at cents per paper on DeepSeek. Readers who want layout-perfect bilingual PDFs should compare PDFMathTranslate, which is AGPL licensed.

The catch: it's a student's one-person project that launched in late September 2026 and ships several releases a day. Installers are unsigned on Windows and not notarized on macOS, so expect security warnings, and the Mac build is Apple Silicon only.