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

In fact, there has been an increase in the use of free machine translation services such as Google Translate in corporate settings.

Last year,
"Tokyo's Taito Ward website is now available in 89 languages
using machine translation.
81 of those languages are translated using Google Translate."
This news became a hot topic.

In Taito Ward, it is reported that using Google Translate, the homepage can be viewed in 81 languages other than English, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Korean, French, Thai, Malay, and Indonesian.

Just like in Taito Ward, you can use free machine translation services such as Google Translate to quickly translate to many languages without incurring any costs.

"You may think, 'Let's introduce machine translation with Google Translate,'
but before doing so, it is necessary to understand the advantages and disadvantages beforehand."

So, today we will introduce the differences between free machine translation services and paid machine translation.
There are three main differences:
1. Quality of translation 2. Customization options 3. Support and assistance

・Customization

・Security

・Cost

We will introduce these three points in two parts.

 

●Customization of Engines

 

The first point is,
"whether the engine can be customized".
With a paid engine, you can set a glossary and use past translation data called
corpus to customize the engine and perform translations using unique terminology and expressions for the company or product.
This is possible by customizing the engine with
the company or product's own terminology and expressions.

On the other hand, with free translation services, you cannot set terminology glossaries, and
most of them do not allow you to choose the field,
making them unsuitable for translating documents that require high quality or have an impact on brand image.
It can be said that they are not suitable for translating documents that require high quality or have an impact on brand image.

For example, in a recent request from a company, we evaluated the quality of machine-translated documents related to cameras using Google Translate. However, there were cases where the word "shooting" was translated as "射撃する" instead of its intended meaning of "撮影する".

When the word "shoot" 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, using inappropriate terms or expressions in translations done by free translation services can greatly increase the likelihood of mistranslations that are not suitable for the content or purpose.

"Just because it's cheap" doesn't mean you should introduce a free engine.
There are many cases where the engine is not suitable for the target document,
so please carefully consider whether customization of the engine is necessary for your purpose.

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

In our next blog, we will introduce the differences between "security" and "cost" from a security and cost perspective!

 
 

At Human Science, we offer the automatic translation software MTrans Team with a "company-specific database (DB)" implemented in Google Translate.

The more you use it, the more translation texts (industry terms, internal terms, etc.) are accumulated, and the corrected translation data is automatically saved, shared, and reused in the database.
As you use it, the common database of the organization accumulates and grows, leading to term standardization and improved work efficiency.

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

Automatic Translation Software MTrans Team
 

 

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Related Articles

Difference between free machine translation like Google and paid machine translation②
https://www.science.co.jp/mt/engine/blog24.html

How to Choose the Best Machine Translation Engine
http://www.science.co.jp/mt/blog/blog11.html

 

Blog Writing Team

Tokuda Ai

・As a machine translation consultant, I provide consulting services for Japanese companies on machine translation implementation and process building.
・I place importance on the quality of the source text, which affects multilingual translation, and also provide consulting services for manual creation suitable for machine translation in the Japanese writing process.
・I also give presentations on the following topics related to machine translation.
- Presentation at the 23rd JTF (Japan Translation Federation) Translation Festival in 2013
"Approaches to Machine Translation in Multilingual Environments
- From the Perspectives of Evaluation and Process"
- Presentation at the 2014 AAMT (Asia-Pacific Association for Machine Translation) Machine Translation Fair
"Mastering Machine Translation - Improving Quality and Productivity"