All development and support of the self-hosted version has now been discontinued
RITA is the culmination of many things, it started with a mobile game, a community of gamers, a discord server of different languages and a desire to all be understood. She is a Real-Time Translator Bot for use on Discord. She is maintained by a small group of users (that have a real life and a job), each with different backgrounds and some learning as we go. You want to learn more about Rita and what she does ? Just take a loot at the introduction page.
The mobile game itself would get old, fast. The community around it, however, is what kept us going. The one downside was we did not all speak the same language. The game we played translated our conversations for us, but Discord did not, so the server admins used a translation bot called C-3P0. This introduction is the start of the story.
There are loads of different translation bots out there, some are amazing, some are expensive, some are free but have limits, and others are just rubbish. C-3P0 checked all these boxes.
Originally called discord-translator and made by Aziz, then forked By NotMyself and renamed Louie, forked again By AlooAkbar and renamed C-3P0, its code was neglected, not maintained, left outdated and iterations made private for commercial gains.
I and a group of fellow C-3P0 users decided that collectively we could do better, plagued with crashes, API changes, relentless bugs and issues, the drive to make something better was born.
Rita’s history and various iterations each added something extra, it just needed to be brought together and molded, molded into something amazing, molded into Rita. The Real-Time Interchangeable Translating Assistant.
Then we provided for a few time a self-hosted version before making the actual version of Unified Rita as it was impossible for everyone to request the google API, to maintain all codes, to help everyone with his particular settings. And moreover, self hosting would not answer to an easy installation with an invite link. Also code was not already used in a good way (meaning, taking some code in order to add it in some exepensive ones).
There you have it, the story, dramatized and electrified for effect, but all true, of how RITA was born.