As many of us know, it takes a long time to learn a new language, and constantly looking up words in a multilingual dictionary is one of the most difficult and time-consuming tasks in the process.
The wonders of the internet and technology have changed our lives completely in terms of learning and reading. Now e-readers like the Nook and tablets are available for students who need a larger font in order to improve their reading ability. The internet has also sped up the learning process substantially and banished the traditional ways of physically searching for a word’s meaning in a multilingual dictionary.
The list below provides a number of best free online translation tool services that you could consider for when you want to translate from one language to another.
1. ImTranslator
ImTranslator (I’m Translator) is an online text to speech and translation tool. It can be used to embed a website for noncommercial use. ImTranslator is also a very convenient add-on for web browsers like Mozilla Firefox, enabling you to translate any text directly from within your browser. Moreover, ImTranslator can also detect the language of the selected text automatically and, as a result, in order to perform the translation, the user just has to select the target language. Through ImTranslator you can also use the Auto-copy feature to save the translation on your clipboard.
2. SDL Free Translation
SDL free translation is widely used by professional translators because of its TM (Translation Memory), which really eases the load when doing big translation projects. The most interesting and useful feature on SDL is that you can choose between a machine-performed Free Translation or a Human Translation, in which, fairly obviously, the translation done by a human being.
Due to the minimal level of accuracy, the SDL machine-performed Free Translations are not really up to the mark for projects requiring perfection. However, they can be helpful to get an idea of the overall meaning of the translated text.
3. Bing Translator
Microsoft’s Bing Translator is also a very popular online translation tool from one of the world’s largest technology companies. This free service is designed to help with translations of web pages, documents, or even just for a word or phrase.The Bing translation engine is also embedded into Windows phones, and because of the free API, developers often consider it to power their in-app translation features. It has an auto-detection feature built in, and supports dozens of languages. Bing Translator also offers the option for users to vote on the translation’s accuracy.
4. WorldLingo
The WorldLingo translator website is another free online translator tool that is very commonly used these days. WorldLingo’s online translation service can translate text or complete web pages by using the same site. According to statistics, WorldLingo has a 70–75 percent translation accuracy rate. WorldLingo translator supports the translation of English, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazilian), Dutch, French, German, Greek, Russian, and Spanish. It also allows you to insert special characters (such as accented letters) and select of the field of the document, such as whether it is for legal, general, or technical purposes.
5. Google Translate
Most of us are already familiar with Google Translate, and in my opinion it’s the best online translation service going. It supports a truly good set of languages, and there are other Google products like the Chrome browser auto-translation feature. Due to its ability to translate text or webpages into target languages, Google Translate is used in many smartphone apps for translation tasks. Unlike other online translation services that use SYSTRAN for translation, Google Translate has its own translation software. The translation results are fairly worthy—though not perfect, of course. This tool falls down when translating complicated sentences, but it’s still one of the best free, web-accessible and mobile-accessible, online translation tools.
Featured photo credit: Vintage typewriter, old books on table sepia photo via shutterstock.com
