Machine Translation: Free and Online
Last updated May. 26, 2008.
Several search engines offer free, online machine translation for Web pages and for text. Machine translation is never accurate, but it can be used to give a general sense of some of the text on the target page. The three search-engine related translation options are
- Yahoo! Babel Fish (an updated version--with one more language pair--of AltaVista Babel Fish)
- Live Translator
- Google Translate (major expansion in May 2008, to include 500+ language pairs)
* In May 2008, Google expanded its language pairs to include any pair of the following languages. Google Translate allows input as "Chinese" and output as either Simplified or Traditional Chinese. So, depending on how you count Chinese (as one or two languages), this means Google Translate can machine translate 506 language pairs (if you consider Chinese just one language) or 552 (if you consider it as two). Only those language pairs available from the other translators are listed above.
- Arabic
- Bulgarian
- Chinese (Simplified)
- Chinese (Traditional)
- Croatian
- Czech
- Danish
- Dutch
- English
- Finnish
- French
- German
- Greek
- Hindi
- Italian
- Japanese
- Korean
- Norwegian
- Polish
- Portuguese
- Romanian
- Russian
- Spanish
- Swedish
