Idealistic

[Starlette7]

This plugin is great and under many circumstances it's hard to find a reason to complain about directly.
In reality though less than 0.001% of runelite users will use this plugin, not to mention how few total players will use it.
Thus the idea of connecting people is technically in vain.
Why one might wonder?

1.Google can randomly consider paypal accounts closed despite having multiple working payment methods.
(Furthermore linking credit cards all over the internet is very unintelligent, data breaches happen all the time.)
2.Not everybody is willing to submit their phone number to everything they use online.
3.A lot of people are just plain nasty and prefer not understanding others to look down upon them.
4.Despite the precautions you can take-- google can and will eventually start charging you or discontinue your services one.
5.There is no longevity in this plugin-- it depends on every single individual user to maintain everything themselves.

Thus it's easy to conclude it's unintuitive and poorly thought out.

I would suggest the following possible solutions:
1.Testing the interest of crowdfunding a medium-scale business service. (If it works everybody on runelite would use it.)
2.Something more simple altogether. You can use bs4 to parse translate via a vm's web browser to relay data.
(More people would be willing to do that for the sake of not handing google excessive personal info for their anonymous personages.)
3.A different service-- I tried researching and personally I am unable to find anything better than google cloud platforms.
(Despite that I am positive -something- exists.)
4.To add to 2: Perhaps studying discord translation bots would help shine some light on how it is possible to do this in a far more simple and user friendly way.

More-over it would probably help to note that "good translation accuracy" is not greater than easy user friendly access.
Translation accuracy is extremely bad even at the highest level of automation.
(I know that has nothing to do with you-- the point is the fact that it's bad either way. This means accessability should be the target.)

No clue if you have any interest in making a universally accessable translate plugin-- just figured i'd drop by with some ideas.
Personally I would really like to see cultural diversity with good social habits on osrs.
Currently it's a pipe dream.

[simbleau]

This was a bit of a long winded way to say you want a free translation service that doesn't depend on GCP. I hear your complaint - GCP was already somewhat hard to get past RuneLite's developers since they feared complication with Google (no one wants a conflict with Google).

I took this route because Google gives better translation services, without question. I would be fine with an acceptable translation service but almost none are free. It is possible to run a NLP translation server locally, but it typically is computationally costly, has poor translation, and doesn't receive updates. I'd have to see evidence to substantiate "good enough" support with such an option.

[simbleau]

Forgot to mention running a community based NLP server is somewhat out of question, and I saw very low return on the donation link included with the plugin to afford such, unfortunately.