Software that translates English into Spanish

Hi,

My name is Sandy Brindamour, Executive Director of Alliance for Living, southeastern Connecticut's only AIDS Service Organization.  We take a holistic and harm reduction approach when serving our members, close to 270 currently, not including children.  Most of our members live at or below the poverty level.  Layoffs are making it all the worse as are cuts from government sources.  Our services range from case management to meals and a food pantry to housing program to support groups and activities (it costs $14 p/person to bowl so to save money, we bought a WII and "we" are having a blast).  Slight diversion, a member's son - all of 6 years old - showed up the adults with strike after strike! 

As more and more of our members are Latino and African-American, we are trying to be culturally sensitive.  It is only right that our newsletter and website (www.allianceforliving.org) be translated into Spanish.  We have very generous Board Members who translate articles from English to Spanish, but there is usually a time lag.  I am looking for software that has the capacity to take something written in English and translating it into Spanish with a push of a button.  Does anyone know of a reliable software that does this?

Many thanks for your help, Sandy

Hi Sandy,

Welcome to TechSoup.  Glad to have you join us!

You should know that translation software (aka "machine translation") won't be perfect in no matter what language you want to translate to.  The most accurate translation remains human-performed translation, which is the only way to guarantee a 100% correct output of your English to Spanish newsletter and website.  I'm telling you this because I want you to know what to expect with translation software, namely that you'll never get fully accurate translations.  However you can still make use of translation software if you want to obtain "on the fly" draft-quality translations of your materials.  Sometimes you don't have the people needed to do the translating, so having the software do it for you can at least get you started with the process which then makes it easier for a person to "finalize".

Before you jump into buying any software, there are a number of free online translation tools that you might want to consider for translating any document for you (newsletters and even entire websites) within a few seconds.  Here are a few free tools I recommend:

1. Google Translate
2. SYSTRANet.com (by SYSTRAN)
3. Yahoo! Babel Fish

Give these tools a go and see what you think.  Often they'll do a decent job, but you should expect some phrases and words to be lost and nonsensical in the translation process.  That's why you'll ultimately need to have the outputted text looked at by a human being -- to render it 100% accurate by someone knowledgeable in that language.  I myself used Google Translate yesterday to get an English-written site that I developed translated into French.  Google Translate did a fairly decent job rendering the French output.  But like all machine translation it's far from perfect, which is why I'm having someone I can trust finalize the French version of the site.

Hope this helps.

Yann

Hi, Sandy,

Welcome to TechSoup. Yann covered the points on translation software and some of the free options  thoroughly. If you have further questions, please feel free to post.

Best wishes,

Sasha

Thanks everyone for your support, you're the best!!

pret auto

Another tool is

www.freetranslation.com