Free Spanish TranslationWhen you want a Spanish translation done, you have a couple of different options. You can go and pay someone to do it for you, you can sit down and do it yourself, go the crowdsourcing route, or you can go to one of the many online free Spanish translation services.
But before we get ahead of ourselves, let's remember the old saying that applies perfectly to free Spanish translation services: You get what you pay for. In this case, a free Spanish translation, but not necessarily a very accurate one. Is that a good thing? Well, it depends on what you're after. If you don't need a faithful translation, and would rather know just the jist of the content of the original document, it might be fine. The purpose of free Spanish translators is to give you a feeling of what the text could possibly mean in another language. No very precise, is it? Well, that might matter to you and it might not matter. But you're probably not going to want to translate your medical records or business contracts with any of them.
That said, I do think that free online Spanish translation services (like Yahoo! Answers) are useful (if not an enjoyable exercise in understanding the difficulty of translation). There are a lot of different services that have popped up on the Internet and each of them have their own strenths and weaknesses. So in order to give you an idea of the differences between different free Spanish translators, I decided to conduct a little experiment. (Feel free to check out the list of free online translation websites I've compiled.) I chose four popular online Spanish translators: Google, FreeTranslation, WorldLingo, and AltaVista (Babel Fish). I then input an English nursery rhyme (I'm a little teapot...)and waited for the results. (Here's another free online translator you might be interested in.) As a final cruel joke, I ran the Spanish translation back through the free Spanish translators to see how close to the original they could come. If anything, I think this proved to be an interesting task showing what you can expect from a free Spanish translation service, as well as demonstrating the difficulty of the task. I've made a page specifically devoted to each of the free online translators and outlined what each is capable of. If you'd rather see the results all together and see how the different translators stack up with each other, you can look at the free Spanish translation results I've posted.
|