...or at least the kind of model that isn't fueled by burning a small forest for every query? I am wanting to play an old video game, but I'm still only just learning the language and could use an aid. I really, really want to avoid any of this incredibly wasteful AI stuff.
Try LibreTranslate. It is a "language model," but it is not a "large" language model along the lines of something like ChatGPT. I am not sure what the training process entails, but it will run on a 10 year old dual core CPU without GPU acceleration. You can test it at libretranslate.org, or you can install it on your own machine if you have Python by running
pip install libretranslate. I run LibreTranslate on a meager VPS (the CPU I just described) and the headroom left over from running Mastodon is enough to handle the translation queries locally, without making any remote requests.