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What's The Best Language Translation Tool?
2014.09.12


When you need to translate one language to another, doing it with a machine or an algorithm is never perfect, but sometimes it's those apps and services are the best tools we have. This week, we want to know which ones you turn to for results that are as accurate and understandable as possible. 

What's The Best Language Translation Tool?

Translation apps and web services are plentiful. Some of them require a constant internet connection, others work offline (which is great when you're traveling.) Some let you update or improve translations if you know better, and others are backed by real humans, checking things over to make sure they're accurate. This week, we want to know which apps or services you think are the best.

Let's hear your vote in the discussions below! To cast your vote, follow these guidelines:

  1. Follow this format for your vote, including the bold print. If you don't, it won't be counted:
    A LOGO OR SCREENSHOT OF THE BEST LANGUAGE TRANSLATION TOOL

    Vote: [BEST LANGUAGE TRANSLATION TOOL]

    Why: Why is this tool the best at translating languages? Maybe they have an audio aspect that works well, or they're plugged into tons of services around the web. Maybe they support tons of languages, or support lots of character types and styles. Make your case! Try to keep it to a single paragraph, maybe two.


  2. Don't duplicate nominations! Instead, if someone's nominated your pick, star (recommend) it to give it a boost, and reply with your story instead.
  3. Please don't leave non-entry, direct comments on this post. They'll just get pushed down. Save your stories for others' submissions!

Vote: Google Translate

Why: Let's get the ubiquitous one out of the way right out of the gate. Google Translate is great, and I made heavy use of it when I was overseas recently. There are tons of languages, and the option to download specific languages to your device for offline use was a huge benefit for those times when I wanted to use my phone without connecting to data of any kind. The translations are generally solid, and I can click to hear a native speaker (or a native speaking algorithm) speak the words or phrase aloud so I can try to parrot it. Simple, basic, and it works really well. Also, if you're a Chrome user, it helps that auto-translation is powered by Google Translate.

Vote: Brain of a professional translator

Why: All the tools that are mentioned here are helpful in certain situations and for certain applications but if one needs truly high-quality translation there is (and there will be) no other choice than the human, professionally trained mind and judgment. (Full disclosure: I'm a professional translator)

 

Vote: Linguee

Why: besides storing definitions individually submitted and approved as a regular dictionary, it crawls the web (or specific sites, maybe) for existing bilingual/translated texts and shows these occurrences side by side when you search for a word. This contextual knowledge is invaluable.

It is also bidirectional, i.e., you don't have to say if it's from English to Portuguese or backwards. (Simply select the pair and it's done.)

Tip: using the Add to Search Bar (restartless) addon on Firefox, you can create custom search engines for any language pair. I have done it with several pair, giving each of them a keyword:lenpt stands for Linguee English-Português, lenes for Linguee English-Español, lespt for Linguee Español-Português, etc. So I just open a new tab and type lenpt installation and Firefox automatically opens the page seen in the screenshot above.

This tip also works for Google Translate: is use gten as a keyword to translate (from an automatically detected source language) to English, gtfr to French, and so on. The search engines for each target language are available with a simple search at Mycroft. (There are some Linguee ones there too, but very few.)

I use both Google Translate and Linguee, since they complement each other.

(Another trick that sometimes helps is using Wikipedia's sidebar with links to the same article in other languages, but I wouldn't qualify this as a proper "translation tool"...)

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