Online Spanish To English Translators

On December 9, 1997, the AltaVista Translation Service was launched by Digital Equipment Corporation and SYSTRAN S.A. The service was the first of its kind, the first European language translation service designed to translate web content. It was an exciting device for non-English speakers, since the Internet is predominantly scribed in English, and it also enabled English speakers to translate material into five different languages: French, Italian, Spanish, German, and Portuguese. This new free service was hosted by Digital’s AltaVista Search engine site, and the server became known as Babelfish (named for the cyborg translation device straight out of Douglas Adam’s novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.)

A virtual garden of online translators has given bloom to many more online Spanish to English translators since AltaVista, such as Google Translate. But how well do these types of free online translators actually work? To understand the answer to this question, we must first look at the different ways to translate a document from Spanish to English.

The first way to translate a document would be to hire a human translator. Generally human translation is done by a person who is fluent in the source language – which in this case would be Spanish – and native to the target language, which for the purposes of this article is English. This type of translation is generally done with documents containing sensitive material that are unlikely to change form, for example a novel or poem.
Computer assisted translation is a sort of interactive machine translation. The machine itself utilizes a sort of “fuzzy memory,” which compares the text to be translated to previous translations, allowing a human editor to choose whether or not to edit, reject, or accept material. Bilingual glossaries are also used in these translations. After a computer assisted translation, little to no editing is required by a human. Retail publishers that put their material through many revisions generally use this sort of translator.

And, lastly, the third type of translation is machine translation, the category in which online Spanish to English translators fall. This is an automatic text translation, and in order to work text to be translated must be controlled and standardized. After the translation is complete, there is still much editing that must be done by the person who desires the translation. Translators like this are used by large military or industrial groups who have the means to make sense of the final product.

Note that each type of translation does require a human translator to edit the finished product. Free online Spanish to English translators fall into the last category, in which unchangeable databases are used to mechanically process translations. And it should be noted that even though machine translation requires controlled language at the imput stage, users of free online translators generally use uncontrolled language, meaning that with an online Spanish to English translator what you put in is not necessarily what you get out.

However, these types of services are good for translating the gist of a document, if that is all you require. This is because even poorly translated material can usually be understood by the reader. Despite the major flaws in online translators, they are especially appealing to those who have no real interest in learning another language, such as ninth graders taking high school Spanish.