If you want to be able to reach an audience in multiple languages, finding the right multilingual translator is important.
You can connect with new people in ways that you wouldn’t be able to with a single language. And, if you’re running a business, you’ll be able to reach new customers and create a better experience for your existing multilingual customers, including offering multilingual customer support and achieving other benefits.
In this post, we’re going to dig into the topic of multilingual translation in detail.
We’ll start with a look at what a multilingual translator is, the different approaches that you can take to multilingual translation, and some of the best multilingual translator services.
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Then, if you have a website, we’ll end with some tips on how to implement multilingual translation for a website.
Let’s get started!
What Is a Multilingual Translator?
A multilingual translator is a tool or service that helps you translate existing content into one or more new languages. This “existing content” could be text, a website, documents, images, and so on.
Good multilingual translation is not just translating content word-for-word, though. Instead, a quality multilingual translator will take context and tone into account to capture the full meaning of the original text.
Some translators will also go beyond just translation and also localize the content in the new language and/or locale. This means accounting for any important cultural differences.
For example, if the original text referenced Imperial measurements, a localized translation might change those measurements to the Metric system if the target audience is people living in a country that uses Metric.
Different Types of Multilingual Translators
There are different types of multilingual translators, and choosing the best approach for your specific situation will depend on your needs and budget.
Below, we’ll cover three different types of translators:
Machine translation
Service/agency translation
Freelancer translation
Machine / Automatic Translation
Machine translators are probably the most popular and well-known multilingual translators, primarily because they’re usually free and easy to use.
These are automated tools that translate content using different types of algorithms, primarily machine learning (for high-quality services).
The most well-known machine translation service is Google Translate, but you’ll find plenty of other options including DeepL, Microsoft Translator, and more.
While there’s a lot to like about machine multilingual translators from a cost and convenience perspective, the main downside is that they still aren’t perfectly accurate.
Machine translation accuracy has improved a lot, especially for popular language pairs (like English and Spanish). For a lot of use cases, automatic translation is good enough.
However, it’s still not perfect. So if you have a situation where you absolutely need 100% perfect translations, you might want to choose one of the other approaches for multilingual translation.
Accuracy is still one of the biggest differences between machine translation vs human methods.
Service/Agency
For larger translation projects, you can find dedicated services/agencies that are focused on multilingual translations.
These agencies typically offer an end-to-end service where they help with all aspects of multilingual translation, including translation itself, as well as any other needed localization.
Many agencies can also help with the technical parts of multilingual translation, such as how to actually implement the translations in your workflows (such as adding them to your website or creating translated documents).
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