Translate.Net

This software is a free multi-lingual aggregator of several on-line machine translation services, among which translate.google.com and Systran. The download and installation are pretty straightforward, but in our experience the interface was not very intuitive and the check boxes tended to be rather unresponsive. However, the software works well (if your expectations of machine translation aren’t too high) and fast. Here are some screenshots:

Paste the source text into the bottom pane. The “Services” tab contains the translation engines that are available, based on your language combination and topic fields (see further below).

The “Languages” tab contains all the language combinations available. The availability of any given combination, however, depends on the choices made in the next tab, “Subjects”. Not all translation engines are available for all languages, so your best option may be to select the subject first and then check if your language combination is available in the “Languages” tab.

The “Subjects” tab contains specialization fields that you can choose based on the type of source text you need to translate. Unfortunately, “Law” seems to be available for Italian, but if you select it the language combination becomes unavailable, so we had to stick to “+Common”.

After you’ve figured out your best options based on the language combination and subjects, click on the “Translate” icon on the bottom left corner. The top pane will contain the translated text delivered by the available translation engines. You may get error messages, for instance if a service is currently unavailable or if your source text is too long. In the screenshot below you can see the EN->IT translation of the Apache 2.0 license from the Google engine.

The excellent freewaregenius offers an in-depth review with descriptions of the program’s features.

Translate.Net home page

Published by Roberto Savelli

English to Italian translator, translation technology enthusiast. http://www.albatrossolutions.com

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