Douglas Smith

Updated Jan 2008

Free Online Translation

These sites perform automated translation of short amounts of text. They don’t even come close to providing perfect translations, so do not try to translate your stories or even your cover letters. However, these sites are helpful for understanding replies from foreign magazine editors written in their language.

Translation Guide – Translates into or from English for a huge range of languages: Arabic , Brazilian , Bulgarian , Chinese , Croatian , Czech , Danish , Dutch , Esperanto , Finnish , French , German , Greek , Hungarian , Icelandic , Italian , Japanese , Korean , Latin , Norwegian , Polish , Portuguese , Romanian , Russian , Serbian , Slovenian , Spanish , Swedish , Turkish or Welsh.

Translation Booth – Arabic, Bulgarian, Czech, Welsh, German, Greek, English, Spanish, Finnish, French, Hindi, Croatian, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latin, Dutch, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Serbian, Swedish, Tagalog, Turkish, Vietnamese, Chinese Trad, Chinese Simp

Lexicool Online Translation – Ever so many free online translation engines accumulated into one page. Engines for Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, as well as links to online translation resources for Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Swedish, Armenian, Slovene, Catalan, Indonesian, Esperanto, Farsi, Bulgarian, Hungarian.

Resource Central – Online translation engine for a number of languages. Plus links to ever so many translations sites and resources

Systran Translation Software site – Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish.

Babel Fish – Chinese, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.

Google translation page – Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish

FreeTranslation.Com – Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish

Dictionary.com Translation site – another online translation engine

Language Identifiers

TextCat – Not sure what language you're trying to translate? Let TextCat tell you.

Foreign Dictionaries

Travlang’s Translating Dictionaries – Handles a lot of languages (even Esperanto), but only one word at a time.

Yourdictionary.com – Translation dictionaries for more than 280 languages. Plus links to several translation engines and sites for large text passages.

Other Resources

LexiCool – primarily a directory of "all" the online bilingual and multilingual dictionaries and glossaries freely available on the Internet. It is a resource intended for translators, linguists, language students and all those interested in foreign languages.

UNESCO translation funding list – UNESCO list of funding national or regional organisms for literary translation.