FREE AUTOMATED MACHINE TRANSLATION SITES FOR THE ENGLISH AND JAPANESE LANGUAGES

We have scoured the internet looking for as many Japanese to/from English automatic translation programs we could find and made a compilation of them with a short review for each.  Almost all, if not all, of these machine translation sites are operated using the SYSTRAN system.  To check the machine translation programs we selected one sentence from our main Samurai Translators web site and ran it through from Japanese to English.

AltaVista Babel Fish - This is possibly the most popular machine translator. It is powered by the SYSTRAN system. The site is straight forward and easy to follow.

Yahoo! Babel Fish - Following the same name, this system is also powered by SYSTRAN and yields identical results. The site is easy to follow and understand.

Google language tools - The sentence was nearly the same as SYSTRAN with only a few minor differences.  Google's system was unable to translate a few kanjis as opposed to SYSTRAN.

WorldLingo language translator - Exact translation and end result in English of the SYSTRAN system so it can only be assumed that it is powered by SYSTRAN. When you have this site translate something for you you get a pop up which is annoying.

Vil-net - Strictly Japanese and English machine translation. You will need to understand the Japanese language to operate the system (or click randomly until you get results). The system was unable to translate several of the kanji in the test sentence.

OCN Machine translation - Translates between the English, Japanese, Korean and Chinese languages only. Does not seem to utilize the SYSTRAN system. All kanji were translated, however, the translation was of poor quality compared to SYSTRAN. The site is in the Japanese language.

FreeTranslation.com - This site seems to have its own translation system and was able to translate all of the kanji but the end product in English was much less comprehensible than SYSTRAN.

1-800-Translate - This web site has taken down its old translation tool and says it will soon install its new translation tool named Xerpa. We will be checking back regularly to see when the new tool goes active.

Translation-guide.com - Is powered by www.tranexp.com's tool. We tried to find the tool itself on the tranexp.com web site but have been unsuccessful in doing so. Upon using the tool from translation-guide.com we found that the tool is unable to translate more than a few words at a time from Japanese into English.

Dictionary.com - Another automated system that appears to be powered by the SYSTRAN device as there is a link to SYSTRAN at the bottom of the page. However, the same translation done by Dictionary.com and Babelfish (which runs the SYSTRAN system) yielded slightly different results in their translation.

Localtranslation.com - This site says it has an automatic translator, but when the information is entered and the translation icon is clicked nothing gets translated and you are offered to have a professional translate it for you for a fee.

Translated.net - This free translating tool was a surprise. Comparing the final translation product between this system and SYSTRAN found that the system this web site uses is actually better and more comprehensible than SYSTRAN. Of course not as good as a human translator, Translated.net automatic machine translation between Japanese and English is the best found on the net so far.

Excite.co.jp - This web site appears to use a different translating tool from SYSTRAN as the final translated piece is quite different from the SYSTRAN translated piece. Like translated.net, this web tool's final translation is probably more comprehensible than SYSTRAN. This site is however a Japanese language site and therefore it might be a bit tricky to use for English speakers. Between the two large boxes where the translation will occur there is a choice of translating from English to Japanese or Japanese to English. The top choice is from English to Japanese and the lower choice is Japanese to English. Below those choices you will see a button. That button is the "translate" button. Click it and wait for your translation.

IBM WebSphere translation server - This web site is able to translate both to and from Japanese and English. This site translates whole web site pages, so you will be unable to translate just small phrases and sentences alone. The translation tool again is different from SYSTRAN but we would say that excite.co.jp and translated.net give slightly better understandability on the final translated piece.

TranslationBooth - This web site claims to have an automatic translation tool for English and Japanese but when we entered the info and clicked translate the machine seemed to get stuck on translating the information and never completed the project. As an added annoyance, while the site was automatically "translating" the information the web page continues to ask if you want the translation done by a person along with a quote of how much it would cost. Just to make sure that the machine did not get stuck only on translating Japanese, we tried to have the machine translate single words in french, spanish and german but to no avail.

Tool.nifty.com - This site is a Jaapnese site. In order to translate from English to Japanese chose the top left option. To translate from Japanese to English select the bottom left option. To translate the project click the button in the lower right corner. The final translation piece was not very good and is not recommended for small translations.