Language Translator
Translate text between 40 languages with voice input and spoken output, with a frank account of where machine translation is and is not trustworthy.
Other suggestions
How to use
- Pick your source and target languages.
- Type, paste or speak your text.
- Read or listen to the translation.
- Translate back to check anything important.
Frequently asked questions
How accurate is machine translation?
Good for gist, variable for detail, and unreliable for anything consequential. It handles common language pairs and everyday prose well, and degrades noticeably with idiom, humour, ambiguity, specialised terminology and less widely spoken languages.
What is back-translation?
Translating the result back into the original language to see whether the meaning survived. It is a rough check rather than proof — a translation can survive the round trip and still be wrong — but it reliably catches the more dramatic failures.
Should I use this for anything official?
No. Legal documents, medical information, contracts and safety instructions need a professional translator, because the cost of a subtle error is not comparable to the cost of the translation. Many institutions will not accept machine-translated documents at all.
Why does it get gender and formality wrong?
Because the information often is not in the source. English 'you' maps to formal and informal forms in many languages, and 'the doctor' carries no gender that a gendered language requires. The system has to guess, and its guesses reflect patterns in its training data — which is where translation bias comes from.
Does my text get sent to a server?
Yes — translation of this quality requires a service, so the text leaves your device. That is worth knowing before pasting anything confidential, and it is a genuine difference from most of the tools on this site, which run entirely in your browser.
Why are some languages much worse than others?
Because quality tracks the volume of training data. Language pairs with vast parallel corpora perform well; low-resource languages have far less to learn from. Translation between two less-common languages often routes through English internally, compounding errors at each step.
🌐 This tool looks up results using MyMemory. The word you enter is sent to that service to fetch results; nothing is stored by this site.