One Hour Translation Blog

Free translation? Yes you heard that right! When you are unable to translate a text into a language of your choice and you find professional services beyond your reach, you can take the help of these free translation tools to at least get an idea of what the author of the text is talking about. Some of the free tools that have been randomly selected are listed here below.

1)      Google translate is a popular free tool for translating web pages in a no. of language pairs. It has been reviewed in detail in another blog. Similarly some of the other web browsers like MSN, Yahoo, Opera, and AltaVista etc. also provide free translation tools as part of the browser software.

2)      Babylon is popular free software that translates to and from 75 languages including web page translation, document translation in the form of word, pdf, txt etc. It uses popular dictionary packs like Britannica, Oxford, Wikepedia etc. The tool can be integrated with MS Office spell checker.

3)      Mymemory.translated.net provides online translation from English to 84 other languages. It relies on human contributions from visitors, professionals, and freely available translation repositories.  Computer translations are provided by a combination of our statistical machine translator, Google, Systran and Worldlingo.

4)      TransApp is a free translation tool for translation of text sentences provided by translationbooth.  It uses proprietary software to automatically handle the translation of web pages that you visit through a proxy server.

5)      Localtranslation.com provides free online tool for translation from English to 8 other languages.

6)      Gts-translation.com connects you with leading free translation tools for translation of texts and web pages from English to 14 other languages. The website provides Systran online translation tool.

7)      Itransaltor.lionbridge.com provides an online translation tool that supports IE only and 16 language pairs.

8)      Majstro is yet another website that provides multi lingual translation dictionary.

It is said ‘you get what you pay for’. It applies to free translation tools as well. The translations are generally not very accurate and can be only used as a guide. Other limitations of these free tools are:

• They do literal word by word translation and not sentence as a whole. Hence you may not get the same translated text in both the directions i.e. changing source language to target language and vice versa.
• Though many language pairs are listed in the website, there is no guarantee that a given sentence, word or phrase would be translated. It may end up with an error. Many of the tools could not translate even simple sentences
• Some of these free translation tools have browser limitations. Most of them work with Internet Explorer but not necessarily with other browsers like Google Chrome, Fire Fox etc.
• Some of the free translation tools appear to have been provided just to attract visitors to the websites. Their focus is really paid for translation services.

To sum up, free translation tools may be useful when you are stuck with a word or phrase while doing translation but they can not substitute good quality professional translation.