Are you planning to develop your business on a global scale? You can translate your texts using various translation tools. In early days of online translation tools, they were widely considered dubious at best, however online machine translators are becoming more reliable, efficient and accurate. They can be very useful when translating online content in order to secure international clients and markets. Here are six of the best translation websites.
Online translation websites: what are they all about?
How do these translation tools work?
Nowadays, all translation services are based on the same technology – deep learning technology. These tools are constantly learning how to improve their translation services.
Even though these tools provide good results, the services provided still fall far behind the ones offered by a translator. To be sure, the quality keeps getting better every year, but it varies depending on the IT resources used and the amount of time the tool has to ensure self-training.
Benefits and limitations of online translation
Translation tools provide free, unlimited services. Translating different content into several languages will not even cost you a penny. Moreover, results are instantaneous, which can be very useful when dealing with tight deadlines.
Nevertheless, these tools have disadvantages that can be very obstructing. In fact, results can be lacking in terms of context, thus producing a “dispassionate” translation. In addition, machine translation vocabulary is simplistic; it does not consider the nuances in the initial message. As such, results may show signs of misinterpretation and tactlessness. The use of a general vocabulary implies that your message may be delivered incorrectly in the target language. Machine translation lack accurate, specific linguistic skills mastered by professional human translators.
Top six online translation tools
1. DeepL
Developed in 2017 by Linguee, DeepL has quickly come to be a high-performance translation tool that uses Linguee’s database to translate texts. This brilliant tool offers high-quality translation services of websites. This AI-based MT analyses the syntax and the whole context of a document, thus providing relevant translations that varies depending on the complexity of the original text.
DeepL also offers several other translation options for some specific words in case the initial translation is not appropriate.
However, this MT is only available in 11 languages: English (British and American), French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish, Russian, Chinese and Japanese.
2. Google Translate
Google Translate is one of the most common and widely used online translation tools.
What are its real advantages? Google Translate offer translation services in more than 100 different languages. You can also upload a file directly from your computer or mobile phone instead of typing it manually into the text zone.
You can also transcribe and translate a direct speech from one language into another on the mobile app developed by this American firm. This option is available in French, English, German, Portuguese, Thai and Hindi.
Google Translate is directly accessible from the search engine and has an extension on Chrome.
3. Reverso
This multi-purpose machine translation tool is nothing if not reliable. Reverso provides accurate translations in more than 15 languages. It is known for giving concrete examples in which the generated translations are used, which helps in better contextualising the translated sentence.
It is free, but a premium version is also available and offers monthly subscriptions from £4.99.
4. Linguee
Linguee is more like a multilingual dictionary. Instead of translating an entire text, it translates words or idioms based on relevant examples of sentences found on the internet, thus making it easier to contextualise and produce the best translations, the one that’s closest to the native language.
5. Yandex Translate
Yandex Translate is the leader of online translation in Russia and Eastern European countries. Provided by the Russian search engine, Yandex, it offers translation services in more than 90 languages, auto-suggests as you type and has a dictionary that can transcribe.
It can also translate an entire website from a URL – a very useful service when translating into Eastern European languages.
6. Microsoft Translator
Developed by Microsoft, this online translator is the direct competitor of Google Translate. It has a wide range of languages (over 70 languages) and translates texts, speeches, conversations and pictures.
You can even download languages with Microsoft Translator for free to be used offline.
It has a mobile app and can be embedded on other online platforms such as Bing.
Several online translation tools can be used to translate various content and help in developing your business on a global scale. For high-quality specialized translations, we recommended contacting a specialized translation agency, like TradOnline.