Difference between free machine translation services and paid machine translation engines ①

We often receive inquiries from customers asking,
“What is the difference between free machine translation services like Google Translate
and paid machine translation engines?”

In fact, there are increasing cases where companies are utilizing free machine translation services like Google Translate.

At the end of last year,
“The website of Taito City, Tokyo,
supports 89 languages using machine translation.
Of these, 81 languages use Google Translate.”
This news became a hot topic.

In Taito Ward, aside from English, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Korean,
French, Thai, Malay, and Indonesian, they used Google Translate for 81 other languages
to make the website accessible in each respective language.
They have implemented this support accordingly.

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

So 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

This article will introduce these three key points.

Engine Customization

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

On the other hand, free translation services generally do not allow you to set glossaries or select specific fields,
so it can be said that they are
not suitable for translating documents that require high quality or that affect brand image
.

For example, the other day, at the request of a certain company, we evaluated the quality of a document related to cameras that was machine-translated using Google Translate.
There was a case where "撮影する", meaning "shooting", was translated as
"射撃する".

If the word "shooting" appears on a company's product page or in instruction manuals,
there is a risk of damaging the image of the company or product.
As in this example, with free translation services,
there is a high possibility that translations will use terms and expressions
that are inappropriate for the content or purpose.

Even if you introduce a free engine just because it is cheap,
if the engine is not suitable for the target document,
there are many cases where it ultimately becomes unusable,
so please carefully consider whether engine customization is necessary according to the intended use.

Engine security

The second point is "Security".
When using free translation services, the most important thing to be cautious about may be this security issue.

In the case of commercial engines, for example, with cloud-based types, an NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement) is signed at the time of contract, specifying that translated documents will not be repurposed for other uses and that corpora will not be shared.
Also, for the "on-premises" type installed in a local environment, since there is no need to connect to the internet, the risk of information leaking via the internet itself is considerably low.

On the other hand, in the case of free engines, it is mostly the case that there is no
confidentiality agreement established between the engine provider and the user/company.
Therefore, the translated data may be used by companies providing machine translation services.

Some of you may remember that there was news about a "data leak from a free machine translation service, which included emails from government agencies and banks."

In this way, information translated using free machine translation services may be at risk of leaking externally, so it is not suitable for translating highly confidential documents or emails.

Engine Cost

The third point is "Cost".
When introducing machine translation, the most concerning factor for everyone may indeed be the cost.

Paid translation engines can be used with more confidence in terms of quality and security compared to free machine translation services, but they come with implementation and operational costs.
Costs vary depending on the engine and type, but implementation can require tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of yen, so it is essential to carefully assess whether the benefits of implementing them outweigh the costs before making a decision.

That concludes the introduction to the differences between free machine translation services and paid machine translation engines.

Documents such as internal documents and user manuals, which require high confidentiality and accuracy of quality are recommended to use paid machine translation engines.

When using free machine translation services for internal documents and user manuals, it is important to check the quality in advance and to effectively utilize them by distinguishing important information, such as "cautions for use," which should be translated by a human.

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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Machine Translation Software MTrans Team

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Explanation of Security Risks in Google Translate
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/