Best online Russian translator?

February 13, 2009 5:14 PM

Best online Russian translator?

My step-father has made contact with a member of the former Soviet Navy that he had some interaction with during the cold war. He's interested in swapping stories and perspectives of certain events (submarine related). He doesn't speak Russian and the Admiral doesn't speak English so for right now they're both using machine translations (Google translate / Word 2007). I know any machine translation is going to be sketchy but is one better than another, particularly for the Russian language? Or are they all driven by basically the same software in the background? My step-dad's got a Russian speaking friend who can help out if things get too dicey but they'll be a time lag for that and he (and the Admiral) are both eager to start comparing notes.

posted by macfly to writing & language (7 comments total)

Well, I can't speak to the Russian aspect but NiceTranslator is hard to beat for interface and simple ease of use.

удачи!
posted by geekyguy at 5:43 PM on February 13

I've played with Systran for German. It also does Russian.
posted by kisch mokusch at 6:00 PM on February 13

I do Russian to English translation as a side job, and Multitran is the best I've found. I don't think it does blocks of text, but for individual words it can't be beat.
posted by nasreddin at 7:42 PM on February 13

I've used Promt.
posted by hala mass at 8:10 PM on February 13

Seconding hala mass. I've usually used Promt for Russian translations.
posted by DeucesHigh at 11:44 AM on February 14

My brother, who works in Russia, said Babelfish and and the Google translators are pretty good, as is ПРОМТ. He also recommend Lingvo (inexpensive) and Reverso for dictionaries.
posted by 6550 at 8:37 AM on February 15

I've recommended promt and he seems to like the interface so I think that's what we're going to go with. Thanks all!
posted by macfly at 10:18 AM on February 16