
All content that goes through the free Machine Translation tools is no longer private. The free solutions are mostly based on collections of bilingual documents found on the Internet or contributed by volunteers. A basic quality AI-based engine requires around one million bilingual segments in order to "learn". In a nutshell, what is put into the engine will shape the quality of Machine Translation output. It can use statistics, a collection of linguistic rules, AI (Artificial Intelligence) or a mixture of the above in order to mimic the translation on new sentences. A segment is the smallest, logical portion of a text, for example a sentence or an item of a bullet point list. The technology is based on the work of translation engines, which use already-translated content.įor example, in order to create an engine that can be used for English - Spanish MT, millions of previously translated English - Spanish segments are needed. There is no human interaction involved, except for setting up the system. The job of Machine Translation is to change content from one language into another. MT technology uses statistics, language rules, AI (Artificial Intelligence) or a mix of above. Automated translation plugins like Microsoft Translate or Google Translate are based on Machine Translation (MT) technology.

What this article is not going to compare is human translation and paid, custom made Machine Translation output followed by professional post-editing step. In each of them, only one solution will be optimal. In the end, we will present a few scenarios. The comparison will be based on the factors listed below:

Each of them is suitable for different purposes. The purpose of this article is for you to understand the differences between professional translation services and free Machine Translation solutions.Įven though we are a translation company, we will focus on showing the positive sides of both solutions. What is the difference between professional translation providers and free machine translation plugins? Can you use free machine translation plugins for commercial use?
