GTS Blog

Translating texts from one language to another has never been easier. Some of the world’s largest software companies (Microsoft, Google) offer a wide range of free translation tools. And there is a wealth of free dictionary tools on the Internet that can be used to look up the translation of a word or term. This post reviews some of the more useful tools.

Do you know of any other useful translation dictionaries? Share it with our readers by adding a comment with the details.

1. LEO. A dictionary from German to English, English to German and between German and Italian, Spanish, Chinese and French. The website has both a German and English user interface. This website is one of the top ranked websites in Germany (number 21 per Alexa).

2. Beolingus. This website, which is operated by the Technical University of Chemnitz in German, features specialized dictionaries by topic for English-German, German-English and between German and Spanish and Portuguese. 

3. Dict.cc. A very robust English-German dictionary, includes sound files for word pronunciation and a user forum to exchange ideas. 

4. SpanishDict. English to Spanish and Spanish to English dictionary.

5. Reverso. Translation in English, Spanish, French, Italian, Chinese, Russian, definitions, synonyms. One of the top 100 sites in France.

6. Wordreference. Dictionary between English and French, Spanish, Italian, German, Russian. This site is in the top 100 websites in both Italy and Spain.

7. VDict.com. Vietnamese – English – French – Chinese dictionary. Has a large following in the US.

8. Seslisozluk. English-Turkish, Turkish-English dictionary.

9. Proz.com. This is the leading portal for translators and language professionals. There are user-created dictionaries and term glossaries covering many different topics and domains in many language pairs. These resources are created and updated by professional translators. 

10. Morfix. an excellent English-Hebrew, Hebrew-English dictionary.

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We have updated and streamlined our free online translation quote application which you can see at www.gts-translation.com/freequote.asp. Users can upload documents in MS Office, RTF, text and PDF file format to our secure server to receive a translation quote.

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Google has been very active in the machine translation space with new languages and language tools being rolled out at frequent intervals. But Microsoft has been busy too, as it appears, and is not ready to concede this key vertical to Google. The Microsoft Translator (http://www.microsofttranslator.com/) has been updated with new language pairs and now includes Hebrew which did not exist previously. It also presents web pages that were translated in Bing in side-by-side format and allows you to translate the same page into any of the languages offered by the service without reloading. 

Microsoft Translator side-by-side view

It is encouraging to see that the major search engine companies are trying hard to make the Internet a global place by making content available in many languages. Of course what is foremost on their minds is maximizing the amount of content delivered to users in order to boost advertising revenues.

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(Ynet) The Israel Anti-Piracy Organization (ALIS) which is the legal representative of the biggest US movie studios in Israel (including Disney, Sony, MGM and Warner) is suing three translators that work for a translation group called QSUBs.  QSUBS translates movie subtitles into Hebrew through crowdsourcing and has translated subtitles for several thousand movies according to estimates. ALIS is demanding that each of the three translators pay a sum of 1 Million Shekels (about $263,000) as well as write a letter of apology for the IP infringement.

This move, which has forced QSUBS to shut down their Internet site, has also caused disappointment in the local community. Israelis who have come to rely on illegal downloads of movies could also get free subtitles for almost every movie that came out. Now, something may get lost in the translation.

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Canada is a big market. It is the largest trading partner of the USA and has population of over 30 million. Canada’s per capita income is one of the highest in the world. So building up a strong online presence in Canada makes good business sense.

Canada poses another challenge to website owners. The country has two official languages which have been constituted in a National Languages act: English and French (Canadian French, also referred to as French Canadian). Since about 7 million people in Canada speak French as their native language, this is a population that can not be overlooked.

A website owner needs to consider two factors when promoting a website for use in Canada: geotargeting (obtaining high rankings in Canadian search engines) and language targeting (translating and optimizing the website for native French speakers).

The safest way to approach geotargeting for Canada is to purchase a .ca top-level-domain (TLD). All major search engines have a Canadian version of their search engine (e.g., www.bing.ca) and they rank .ca domains at the top of search engine queries made in the Canadian search engine.

Another issue to consider is, although a very minor one, is the use of English for Canadian audiences. Canadian English is a mixture of UK English and US English with some very few Canadian distinctions. Please see this for some information on Canadian English. So you probably do not need to maintain a separate language version for Canadian English and you can use your UK or US English website content in your .ca domain. You may want to use some basic redirects for some of the pages in your Canadian site to avoid duplicate content on your websites.

The issue of French Canadian is more complex. The differences between European French and Canadian French are major, and here you will need to maintain separate European French and Canadian French language versions (if you need to have both). Both Google and Bing have Canadian French language versions of their search engines which favor websites that are written in French Canadian. Make sure to maintain the correct meta tag in your Canadian French website pages (<meta http-equiv=”Content-language“ content=“fr-ca“>).

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