Today we have a guest post from education writer Karen Schweitzer. Karen is the About.com Guide to Business School. She also writes about online colleges for OnlineColleges.net.
Finding free translation tools online is a great way for translators and language learners to practice their skills. There are many different tools that can be used for translating text, websites, emails, and even speech. Here is a list of 20 free tools for translators and language learners to try:
WorldLingo – is a top-notch professional translation service that offers a free text, document, website, and email translator. The free translators have a 500 word limit.
SDLFreeTranslation.com – This free translation site provides language learners with tools to translate text and websites into more than 30 different languages.
Free-Translator.com – allows you to translate up to 150 words at a time. With this site, users can also translate web pages, find newspapers and courses for practice, and much more.
Translation2 – features a free text translator, dictionary, text to speech translation, and IM translator. The text translator provides a free editing tool, keyboard, decoder, and spell checker.
Google Translate – a free translator that allows you to enter text, web pages, or simply upload a document. Google Translate also features tools for searching web pages in other languages that can then be translated into your native language.
Dictionary.com – provides a free translator for translating text in over 85 different languages. Just a few of the languages included in this translator are French, Chinese, German, Japanese, Spanish, and Hindi.
Mezzofani Translations – This free translation site offers direct access to multilingual dictionaries and translators. Mezzofani Translation features a rating system for several translators as well as offering links to many more.
Freelang.net – provides users with free bilingual dictionaries, human translation, and other resources that are useful for language learners. This site also features a helpful forum for finding words and expressions in a wide variety of languages.
YAHOO! Babel Fish – In addition to providing a search engine, YAHOO! Also offers free text and web page translation tools. The Babel Fish translator allows users to translate up to 150 words at one time or enter the web page they wish to be translated.
ConveyThis – has a free translator that will translate your text into 40 different languages. This site also offers a website translation button that can be added to your website or blog to make it accessible in 40 languages.
Linguanaut Free Translation – features free human translations in over 40 languages. The translations are provided by several volunteer translators. One translation request can be submitted every 24 hours.
e-Free Translation.com – This translation site offers free language translators and dictionaries in over 30 different languages. E-Free Translation.com also provides language practice by featuring the news in 32 languages.
TRADUguide – a portal for language interpretation and translation services, offers a free beta translator’s dictionary. The site allows you to add a word or phrase then pick a source and target language.
Foreignword.com – This online language site offers a translation wizard, dictionary links, and a translator’s directory. The site also features a quick find for other languages and options.
Word2Word – a free language learning site that offers free courses, chat rooms, forums, and translation services. Within this site, users will find links to over 50 free online translators and translation software.
Applied Language Solutions – This online translation company offers a free online language translator that can be used for translating several languages. The translator features text, e-mail, and website translation.
Prompt Translator – The Prompt Translator is a free online dictionary as well as text, website, and desktop translators.
Babylon 8 – This leading translation software offers an online language translator that anyone can use free of charge.
Cucumis – This translator site offers free translations to users. The site is based on a translation exchange service. Every time you translate information you gain points. If you do not speak a foreign language, you can gain points by logging in every ten days.
Global Voices – This site offers free online text translation and translation tools that can be used for translating French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, and Spanish. Global Voices also features a free text translation tool for websites.
Some of the sites, I already know. They are helpful, but people who use this kind of service must be atempt for the fact that these translations aren’t 100% correct, and we must pay atention to the results. (machines don’t think, so they don’t use the best option). It’s very common to find translations with Proper names ex. the Brazilian city of Santa Maria, should be written this way in any language, but appear as Saint Maria, Saint Mary, Santa Mary…, which of course is wrong. Anyway these are very important clue.
Most of the sites on this very long list provide machine translation services. It’s not difficult to find many tens of such sites with Google. What’s difficult / time consuming is filtering out those that are actually useful / different from each other. I tried the Greek-English translation of those sites that offered it, and it turns out that there are only two that don’t produce the exact same result as either Google Translate or Babelfish. These were SDLFreeTranslation.com and Babylon 8 (again, both use the same translation engine). Some of the sites didn’t even work, or messed up the encoding of Greek characters before forwarding the text to the translation engine, and thus produced a garbled result instead of the English translation. So, for Greek-English automatic translation there seem to be only 3 choices.
It would be much more useful to have a smaller selection of good websites, with short reviews, to help the readers choose a suitable one (instead of just presenting them with a huge list).
The title of this post is a bit misleading. While the free translation sites may be helpful to language learners, they would not be used by professional translators. Translators do access online (and off line) dictionaries, but they do not use Google Translate!
A new and totally different translation system for websites can be found here: http://www.yourwebsitein40languages.com – it works in realtime, has no plugins or popups and is easily the best machine translation system for websites and can be installed in minutes. I use it on my website and it works great.
All those free online translation tools have their place, but I doubt you would ever see a professional translator opting for any of these services.
At best, machine translations give you a semi-coherent text that just about gets the intended message across. At worst, what you have is a garbled, nonsensical spiel that mixes tenses, confuses grammar and throws in a few hilarious (if potentially embarrassing!) ‘mis-translations’ to boot!
Regards,
Lingo24
http://www.lingo24.com