machine translation system for Windows XP?

January 25, 2004 1:32 PM

Does anybody know of a a) Useful and b) Free online or downloadable machine translation system? I use windows XP.

And by Useful I mean most definitly not BabelFish, which is hardly above the level of a joke.

posted by signal to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

Babelfish is pretty much the best general-purpose machine translation system available. In specific domains, there may be better systems. I seem to recall, for instance, that Xerox designed an English dialect for its manuals, and a machine translation system to go along with it. As long as you wrote solely in this subset of English, the translation system did a fairly amazing job of translating your documentation into other languages. Not real useful for translating random texts, though.
posted by kindall at 2:31 PM on January 25, 2004

If such a thing exists, I doubt you'll be able to find it free. Even Systran products, which are the ones used in BabelFish, are not free.

You could try finding something nice here though.

Sorry if my post was not of any help.
posted by Masi at 2:33 PM on January 25, 2004

http://www.freetranslation.com
or slightly better as it has serveral different sources:
http://www.foreignword.com
posted by romakimmy at 6:29 AM on January 26, 2004