Do free translation systems work?

 

Sometimes we need to translate a text and we choose to use a free translator. Either out of haste, out of savings, out of necessity or simply because we think it’s the best option, but is it?

“English to Spanish Google free translator” is one of the most searched text regarding translations in the different search engines that we can find in the Internet. The reason is that it is used more often than we think. Options such as free Word Reference allow users to do their translations, but, in our experience, this is not a recommended option for a business usage, as there are a number of cultural and contextual adaptations that must be done correctly for the result to be optimal.

It is true that with the development of the neural automatic translation (NMT), the results obtained in free translators have taken a qualitative leap. But we must bear in mind that whenever we use one of these free translators, what we do is upload our texts to the cloud (to the Internet). In case of confidential content, this doen’t seem to be the most sensible option. In this case and also when the volume of documents is high and the time or budget, scarce, we suggest to use automatic translation but always in a controlled environment.