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Get Lost in Translation Sites
Posted by Wendy Boswell at 2:00 AM on October 23, 2007
The web makes it possible to search for documents written in every conceivable language, but what if you don't actually know the language you find that special somethin' written in? No worries—there are plenty of online translation services that can give you anything from just a good idea to a complete translation of what you're looking at.
Disclaimer: None of the following language translation services can substitute for a real live human translator.
Language to language
Say you've got a block of text you need translated. Generally, the best tool for the job would be Babelfish, a simple translation service that translates something for you "from" a language "to" a language.
Google Translate can unlock blocks of text for you from language to language. You can also use it to translate an entire web page by simply entering in the URL, but this doesn't always work the way you'd like it to (they also have a language to language dictionary, as well as a way to set Google's interface in your preferred language.) There's also gTranslate, a Firefox add-on that uses the Google translation service to translate the text on the page so you don't have to visit the Google Translate site itself. Windows Live has a similar service.
One of the best (and easiest to use) language translation tools available right now is the FoxLingo add-on for Firefox. It translates web pages and block text in 45 different languages.
There's also Translate 2.0, a simple translation site that keeps a running track of your entries and offers them up in a PDF format for extra handiness.
Language Dictionaries
WordReference is a set of free online translation dictionaries (French, Spanish, Italian, etc.) that offer a bit more than just straight word to word translation; you also get a spoken word demo as well as detailed etymology of the word or phrase you're trying to translate.Specific Language Tools
There are many translation sites out there that specialise in just one or two languages, which actually makes them more useful since they tend to pick up on more language to language idiosyncrasies. Beolingus is an English/German site that offers translation services as well as definitions, synonyms, example sentences, and aural samples.
Misc. Language Tools
The Speech Accent Archive, while not strictly a translation service, does offer you the opportunity to listen to literally hundreds of languages being spoken by native speakers— a great way to see if you're saying something right or getting an ear for the language.
Anyone who's ever attempted to learn a language knows that verb conjugations can get tricky. That's where Verbix comes in handy; it's a free online verb conjugator available for dozens of languages.
If you want to read news in your language from all over the world, try Newstran, a free translator for over 10,000 global newspapers. Note: be prepared for some slow load times depending on what language you're looking for.
How about videos? dotSub is a small but growing site that offers a selection of (mostly technology-related) videos translated into a variety of other languages.
You can use the Internet Slang Translator to figure out what someone is saying to you online; for more on-the-fly translation goodness, try the Google Translate Buttons, drag and drop language functionality for your browser toolbar. In addition, if you're someone that needs language translation services frequently, you might want to check out setting up a Yahoo Pipes system to translate an RSS feed in another language.
While none of these tools can sub for a native language translator, most of us don't have the luxury of one of these folks sitting right in front of us when we need them. What's your favourite language translation tool? Let's hear in the comments.
Wendy Boswell, Lifehacker's Weekend Editor, needs to brush up on her French.
Tags: feature | firefox | firefox extensions | google | language | languages | search | search engines | technophilia | top | translation | web | web browsing
Comments (AU Comments · US Comments)
Sally, translator
Posted November 28, 2007 12:25 AM
"...None of the following language translation services can substitute for a real live human translator..." - I agree almost completely. Of course, sometimes I use online translation just for help, but it usually makes so much semantic mistakes, that a sentence can even loose its sense.
http://www.all-translations.com
russian translation
Posted January 17, 2008 5:41 PM
Well, if you just need to get a general idea of the text online translators are great. However presentations, user-manuals, marketing materials DO REQUIRE a professional translation.
www.PoliLingua.com
Tim
Posted May 8, 2008 7:03 AM
This is such a common topic... You will get around 26% of the whole idea of the machine translated text. So, don't even bother using them. You can definitely find a reasonably "cheap" translation services.
blairlucas
Posted 11:31 PM 23/10/07
I work for a Danish company, and despite the Danes' general amazing fluency in English, it is notoriously difficult to find an online translator for Danish to English. But this one is superb: [visl.dk] For all you others out there stuck trying to translate tricky Danish-only documents...
blairlucas
blackrock
Posted 12:17 PM 23/10/07
I'm glad that you made the disclaimer that auto or software translations cannot replace a human translator. A lot of people rely on auto translators and don't realize that they are getting an inaccurate translation. If you simply need to get the basic idea of something then an auto translator is fine. However, if you need an accurate understanding or the document has some official purpose I would find a professional human translator. I would suggest: Professional Translator.. If you need a good bilingual dictionary [www.wordreference.com] is one of the best.
blackrock
orangewarp
Posted 4:50 AM 23/10/07
For anyone interested in learning Japanese, I recommend
[j-talk]
This site won't give you Japanese to English, or Japanese to any other language but the beauty of it is that it parses kanji (Chinese characters) into phonetic hiragana. You can get it to display in hiragana or even in romaji with English word translation which is a lifesaver for someone like me who grew up Stateside and can speak but can't read and write well. Another good program you might consider is
[rikaichan] which does the same thing but is a plug-in for Firefox and Thunderbird.
orangewarp
Knight_Owl
Posted 10:24 PM 22/10/07
I've not used most of the mentioned sites, but I use www.freetranslation.com to translate blocks of text at work (typically pasted from Spanish emails), which works pretty well -- at least enough for me to understand the jist of the message.
Knight_Owl
tiemposbuenos
Posted 8:05 PM 22/10/07
I do quite a bit of translating from Portuguese into English (and sometimes Spanish). Even if you speak the languages well (which I do), when translating it can help to look something up in its own language (eg, look up an English word in an English dictionary, not just an Portuguese-English dictionary). Oftentimes this gives you more of the nuances of a word. For lack of a better option, I usually use wiktionary for this purpose, though if anyone has any better tips for a good Portuguese online dictionary, I'd love to hear them! I'd imagine that wiktionary is decent in English, but in Portuguese it leaves a little to be desired.
tiemposbuenos
Claire
Posted 6:41 PM 22/10/07
A really good dictionary for English/Italian word translations is Garzanti. The site starts in Italian, but there's a link at the top of the page to switch to English.
The Merriam-Webster online dictionary also has French/English and Spanish/English dictionaries. Right now you can access them for free after you watch a brief ad.
Claire
Karmon
Posted 5:02 PM 22/10/07
systranet.net - I sometimes have to break more complicated sentences down into segments, but it does a decent job translating phrase rather than word-by-word (at least French/English translations).
Karmon
Mossy
Posted 3:33 PM 22/10/07
Sometimes you're in a situation where you don't even know what language the text is in. [Langenberg.com] has several language identifiers, as well as access to a variety of online machine translation programs in different languages.
Mossy
therethinker
Posted 3:16 PM 22/10/07
What is that picture of? Its obviously French, but very sucky french at that...
Otherwise, good to know.
therethinker
Abelianality
Posted 3:04 PM 22/10/07
In most languages, I can usually get more comprehensible results than babelfish by searching word-by-word (although of course, this takes considerably longer and is really only worth it if I'm trying to learn the language).
The tricky thing with this is that need to be able to look up the words fast enough to keep them all in my head at once, so I've set up bilingual firefox quick searches for the languages I'm interested in. For example, if I'm reading something in Italian, I can open a new tab, type "ie _____" (or "ei _____ for English-Italian) and get a translation, then quickly switch back and forth between tabs, translating words I don't know. The day I discovered that radio-button options allow distinct firefox quick searches was a fine day, indeed.
Abelianality
srudes2
Posted 2:57 PM 22/10/07
[www.popjisyo.com]
This is a very good Japanese translator.
You can do the sentence translation yourself, but you get every word. This way you won't end up those weird sentences. To see how it works you just have to go there. It's kinda difficult to explain.
srudes2
alekdavis
Posted 2:53 PM 22/10/07
"Whats fun is to write a paragraph in English, use an online translator to translate it to German, then take the German translation and translate it into Spanish, then translate the Spanish back into English." Some people have way too much time on their hands. ;-)
alekdavis
pwnedd
Posted 2:48 PM 22/10/07
[adsotrans.com] is a really nice collaborative Chinese-English / English-Chinese translation site. There used to be a front-end site (newsinchinese.com) that parsed news feeds from XinHua using the adsotrans database and displayed them, but the server appears to be down at the moment.
pwnedd
Pinny
Posted 2:28 PM 22/10/07
Probably one of the rarer languages that are hard to get translations for is Amharic.
Here is a blog that teaches your Amharic word by word:
[www.learnamharic.com]
Pinny
InklingBooks
Posted 2:18 PM 22/10/07
These sites are great if you're dealing with a modern, spoken language, but what if you need to translate from Latin to English? For that, the Internet is almost worthless.
A century ago, most educated people knew a smattering of Latin, particularly classical phases with links to Roman literature and history, which they tossed into their writings. We have a much narrower education, so reading what they wrote leaves us confused. What does "Veni, vidi, vici" mean anyway? Fortunately, for that phrase Wikipedia has an answer.
Babelfish and Googlefish should add Latin English translation to their list of languages.
--Michael W. Perry, author of Untangling Tolkien
InklingBooks
pospam
Posted 1:47 PM 22/10/07
You can also use my fav greasemonkey script babel
Mousish
[userscripts.org]
Just hold ctrl while selecting any text and you get the translation right away.
Cheers
pospam
Zundfolge
Posted 12:29 PM 22/10/07
Whats fun is to write a paragraph in English, use an online translator to translate it to German, then take the German translation and translate it into Spanish, then translate the Spanish back into English ... sometimes the results are hilarious.
Zundfolge
Sanja
Posted 5:42 AM 24/10/07
Add [www.online-translator.com] to your collection. Translates between Russian and English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese (Brazilian Portuguese is also available) and Italian. Excellent online English-Russian dictionary is [MultiTran.ru.] Another useful one is [lingvo.yandex.ru]
Sanja
jozilla
Posted 4:26 AM 26/10/07
I use Interglot a lot to translate between Dutch and English words (it can translate from and to English, French, German, Spanish, Dutch and Swedish.
jozilla
RabbitRun
Posted 12:57 PM 27/10/07
I'm glad that you made the disclaimer that auto or software translations cannot replace a human translator. A lot of people rely on auto translators and don't realize that they are getting an inaccurate translation.
I thought that disclaimer was hilarious - I wasn't aware that some people actually think that software could give them an accurate translation, is it really that widespread?
RabbitRun