Machine Translation: Free and Online
Last updated Mar. 12, 2009.
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 and has gradually increased the languages covered. Google Translate allows input as "Chinese" and output as either Simplified or Traditional Chinese. As of March 2009, Google Translate can machine translate 1,722 language pairs. Only those language pairs available from the other translators are listed above. Here is Google's list of languages that it can translate between any two of them.
- Albanian
- Arabic
- Bulgarian
- Catalan
- Chinese (Simplified)
- Chinese (Traditional)
- Croatian
- Czech
- Danish
- Dutch
- English
- Estonian
- Filipino
- Finnish
- French
- Galician
- German
- Greek
- Hebrew
- Hindi
- Hungarian
- Indonesian
- Italian
- Japanese
- Korean
- Latvian
- Lithuanian
- Maltese
- Norwegian
- Polish
- Portuguese
- Romanian
- Russian
- Serbian
- Slovak
- Slovenian
- Spanish
- Swedish
- Thai
- Turkish
- Ukrainian
- Vietnamese