Using free online English to Spanish translators helps if you need a quick translation or if you are stuck figuring out what a word or phrase means. While there are many translators available on the Internet, some are better translators than others and using the good ones will assist you in learning the authentic Spanish language.
Why Use Online Translators?
Translators make converting one language to another simple. With one easy click after entering your word or phrase into a website, you can have a translation within seconds. Some main reasons that you might want to use a free online English to Spanish translator include:
- You need to quickly translate a phrase or word and have no access to someone who knows Spanish or English.
- you want to know or learn what something in English means in Spanish or what something in Spanish means in English for a paper or to find out what someone said.
- With the burgeoning technology of mobile broadband cards and the decreasing size of laptops and netbooks, you can use a mobile computer to bring up a translating website and do an on-the-spot translation.
Assuming you have access to the Internet, online translators provide the convenience of knowing someone who speaks the language or having a portable language translator without having to make new friends or purchase specialized electronics.
Accuracy
Behind the website is a machine doing all the translating. Most of the time, the computer does a direct translation that does not include subtle nuances. For example, Castillan Spanish is slightly different than Latin American Spanish and those differences may not show up using a free online English to Spanish translator. Single words are the easiest to translate because programmers can just input the English word for the Spanish word. The free online translators are excellent if you need to find out what one word means in another language. Phrases translations typically have a mistake or two, but the meaning is not lost.
Where to find Free Online English to Spanish Translators
One of the most popular free online translators available on the Web is at Google Translate. As with most Google features, the interface is crisp, with no clutter. A box is available to enter your word, phrase or link to a webpage. After selecting the languages you want to translate to and from, click Translate and Google displays the translation on the right. As of this writing, about 50 languages are available for translation.
One of the older online translators is Yahoo Babel Fish. Babel Fish limits your blocks of text to 150 words and gives you a separate box to enter in a link if you need an entire webpage translated. Yahoo gives you a good tip to ensure you have the best possible translation: make sure that the spelling, punctuation and grammar is written well. After you've translated some text, Babel Fish offers to do a search based on the translated phrase. This can help you find webpages with that phrase so that you can fine tune any part of the translation. Babel Fish is also available in the Yahoo Tool Bar that can be downloaded to your computer.
The online translator at this website operates very similarly to Google Translate and Babel Fish with one unique difference. If you don't know the original language, then you can have the website detect the language. Seven languages are available as of this writing: English, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, Russian and French. Detecting a language can come in handy because sometimes Spanish and Portuguese can have very comparable translations.
Other Tools
If you find yourself using an online translator quite often for the same language, especially Spanish, then consider investing in a Spanish to English or an English to Spanish dictionary to get the best accuracy you can.
