From our customers
"What is the difference between free machine translation services like Google Translate
and paid machine translation engines?"
We often receive inquiries like this.

In fact, there are increasing examples of companies utilizing free machine translation services such as Google Translate.

At the end of last year,
"The homepage of Taito Ward, Tokyo,
supports 89 languages using machine translation.
Of which, 81 languages are Google Translate"
became a hot topic.

In Taito Ward, it is said that Google Translate has been used to support the homepage in 81 languages other than English, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Korean,
French, Thai, Malay, and Indonesian.
This allows the homepage to be viewed in various languages.

In places like Taito Ward, by using free machine translation services such as Google Translate,
you can quickly translate into many languages without incurring costs.

You might think, "Well, let's implement machine translation with Google Translate," but before doing so, it is necessary to understand the advantages and disadvantages.

Today, we will introduce the differences between free machine translation services and paid machine translation.
The three main differences are as follows:

Customization

Security

- Cost

We will introduce these three points in two parts.

 

●Engine Customization

 

The first point is,
whether the engine can be customized.
With a paid engine, you can set up a glossary and use past translation data called
corpus to
customize the engine,
allowing translations that use terms and expressions unique to that company or product.

On the other hand, free translation services generally do not allow for the setting of glossaries, and
most do not allow for the selection of fields,
so it can be said that they are not suitable for translating documents that require high quality or that impact brand image.

For example, the other day, at the request of a company, I evaluated the quality of a document related to cameras that was machine-translated using Google Translate.
One issue was that the meaning of "shooting" was translated as "shooting" but ended up being translated as "shooting".

When the term "shoot to kill" appears on a company's product page or instruction manual,
there is a risk of damaging the image of the company or product.
As in this example, free translation services are likely to produce
translations that use terms and expressions that are not suitable for the content or purpose.

Even if you introduce a free engine just because it is cheap,
if that engine is not suitable for the target documents,
there are many cases where it ends up being useless,
so please carefully consider whether customization of the engine is necessary based on its intended use.

This time, we focused on one of the major differences between free machine translation services like Google Translate and
paid machine translation engines, which is
customization.

In the next blog, we will introduce the differences in terms of security and cost!

 
 

Human Science provides automated translation software MTrans Team that implements a "company-specific database (DB)" in Google Translate.

The more you use it, the more translation texts (industry terms, internal terms, etc.) are accumulated, and the modified translation data is automatically saved, shared, and reused in the database.
As it is operated, the organization's common database accumulates and grows, leading to terminology unification and improved work efficiency.

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A 14-day free trial is also available. Please give it a try.

Machine Translation Software MTrans Team
 

 

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Related Articles

Differences between free machine translation like Google and paid machine translation ②
https://www.science.co.jp/mt/engine/blog24.html

How to Choose the Best Machine Translation Engine
https://www.science.co.jp/nmt/blog/21011/