Learning languages is very interesting yet when you are still on the initial stages of learning you may become eager to immediately understand what you are reading or listening to. On the internet there are various language translators which may guide you as you enrich yourself with the language you are learning and most of them have helped a lot of people in translating webpages and texts.

The following are just some of the many online language translators, their features, and some of their advantages and disadvantages.

Babel Fish – used to be powered by AltaVista and now by Yahoo!, Babel Fish is among the pioneering translation tools on the web. The site allows translations in Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. It also allows embedding of a widget on your personal site to enable your readers to translate your site content into the language they prefer. Babel Fish is a powerful online tool yet it doesn’t assure accurate human translation since it is an automated translator that uses a machine to translate words.

Babylon – it is a free online translation site which supports more than seventy-five languages. The service of this translator is aimed to help users gain the basic understanding of texts in an unfamiliar language. The service of Babylon has been tried and tested many times over yet they admit that there are times that the translations have pitfalls perhaps due to inaccurate translations. Among the languages supported by Babylon include Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish.

Google Translate – this online language translator powered by Google now supports translations in five hundred six language pairs and is one of the most comprehensive online translation tools available for free. As most translation sites don’t give perfect translations, Google Translate has the same weakness however it makes understanding the central ideas of the text easier. The languages supported by Google Translate include Albanian, Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, 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, and Vietnamese.

Nice Translator – it is a quick online translation service which allows you to translate text between thirty-six languages. When using this site all you have to do is select one or more languages you want to translate into then type or paste in the stuff you want to be translated, press the Enter key then everything will be translated in a snap! What is so nice about Nice Translator is that it auto-detects the language you are translating from and translate it into your selected languages right away. The site does not require registration and it has an easy to use and clean interface. In Nice Translator you can translate text to and from Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, English, Dutch, Filipino, Finnish, French, German, Greek,Hebrew, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Lithuanian, Latvian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Polish, Russian, Romanian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese. A lot of people who use Nice Translator think it is more than just nice because its translations are superb and almost accurate and it also has plugins and widgets which you can embed in your website or blog.

SDL FreeTranslation.com – it is a free translation site which allows users to translate text and web pages in various languages. It is one of the popular translation sites online having an estimate of two million visitors a week. It supports Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish languages.

There are more language translators out there on the web which may or may not offer the same kind of services, features and satisfaction to its users. Online translation tools are very useful especially when there is immediate need to translate important things. However, bear in mind that these online tools are automated and cannot assure you perfect or accurate translations all the time.

Read more about some add-ons in firefox that help you translate and learn languages online.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 20th, 2009 at 12:18 pm and is filed under Learn Languages. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.