Free Online Translations Guide

Free online translations is well...free-the cost is right, but can you live with the quality?

Many translation companies and agencies offer machine translation (MT) as free online translations, free language translation, and simply free translation. The Babel Fish Translation service by Altavista is powered by Systran (maker of machine translation software).

Select a short sentence-2 at the most-and run it through the Babel Fish Translation for a free language translation. Here is what you do for an online English Japanese translation:

• paste your source text into the input box labeled Translate a block of text
• select "English to Japanese" translation from the dropdown box labeled Select from and to languages
• click the button labeled Translate

You have a free translation! But is this right for your online translations project? Complete the exercise to find out:

• select and copy the Japanese translations from the top input box
• paste the Japanese translations into the input box labeled Translate again
• this time, select "Japanese to English" translation from the dropdown box labeled Select from and to languages
• click the button labeled Translate

The online English Japanese translation appears in the top input box.

Accuracy estimates vary greatly depending on who is researching (30%) and who is selling (98%) machine translation (MT) software. Our research indicates 70% is a fair assessment for machine translation (MT) accuracy. From a professional perspective of 11 years of experience in Japanese to English translations and English to Japanese translation, machine translation is efficient in looking up dictionary terms (meaning of words). In most cases, I find it is much more productive to simply do the translation myself.

As was noted in the Wall street journal in 2002 "I definitely would not use machine translation (MT) for business or anything remotely requiring accuracy."

Translation by its very nature represents everything that is human-thought! Translation is a human activity that requires enormous language skills and subject matter knowledge with years of experience. Machine translation which translators online offer as free online translations, free language translation, or simply free translation, is most effective in the following situations:

• fields with highly limited ranges of vocabulary and very simple sentence structures
• for "gisting" or, to get the general meaning (gist) of a document

See Online Translations Terminology (opens in new browser window)

Machine translation is useful for online translations projects that have all the following project requirements:

• internal consumption
• limited budget
• short time frame

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This page is the Saeculii Free Online Translations Guide for types of online translations.