Translation Services and Sources

Translation Services

Machine translation services (where a computer does the translating) produce very crude translations that give you the gist of a document, but are not reliable (or quotable). Professional human translators are expensive. So there is no magic solution to the translation problem.

Automatic machine translation services

If you plan to scan an article in a paper journal and then use automatic machine translation, keep the following in mind. Your OCR (scanning) software should have a dictionary for the language you are scanning (e.g., German). If it does not, it will make many, many spelling errors and no machine translation service will give good results. If you plan to manually key in the text, read the online help at that translation site about how to enter accents, umlauts and other special characters first.

  • At Freetranslation you can paste text (up to 10,000 characters) and get a free bidirectional machine translation between English and 30 other languages and between a few other pairs. For a fee you can get a human edited translation. For yet a bigger fee you can get a professional human translation in an expanded range of languages. Free online quote. Uses SDL software.
  • WorldLingo offers free bidirectional machine translation for 14 languages (Arabic, traditional and simplified Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish). Submit the URL of a single web page or paste your document into their form (but 500 word limit). For a fee you can get a professional human translation in an expanded range of languages.
  • Systran offers free bidirectional machine translation for 15 languages (Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish). Submit the URL of a single web page or paste your document into their form. Uses Systrans software, the market leader. You can purchase translation software.
  • Altavista Babelfish (Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish). Uses Systran software.
  • Latin dictionary translates Latin to English and English to Latin. Single words only.
  • Eurocosm Multilingual Phrase Dictionary (English, French, German, Italian and Spanish with audio pronunciations). Only translates phrases, not whole sentences or documents, but phrase dictionaries are usually more accurate that one-word-at-a-time dictionaries.

Human translation services

This is often the only way to get a reliable translation, but be prepared to pay $.20 to $.25 per word if you use a professional. Perhaps you can use free automatic machine translation to get the gist of an article, identify the key pages and passages, and then ask a human translator to produce a polished translation of the key passages. Let the library know if you discover translators are willing to accept small jobs like that.

  • Many freelance translators in the DFW area are members of Metroplex Interpreters and Translators Association. Freelancers are likely to offer lower rates than large companies. Try this first.
  • 1-800-translate.com. For fee you can get a professional human translation in a wide range of languages.
  • Tizoc International, a firm based in Dallas, can handle many languages. Free online quote available. Expect to pay $.20/word in most cases.
  • American Translators Association Directory lists over 5,000 professional translators and interpreters. You can search by language and specialization. For example, choose "religion" and "German to English." The ATA company directory lists hundreds of translation/interpretation companies.
  • Go translators provides contact information for human translators in well over a hundred languages.

Indexes of Published Translations

  • Index translationum: International Bibliography of Translations lists translations of books published by member states of UNESCO. It does not include journal articles. The paper edition (which is in some DFW area libraries) covers from 1932 to date. The database begins coverage with 1979. You can search by author or title.
  • Good old WorldCat is another excellent source of finding books translated into English. You can search by author or title.
  • On rare occasion you will find a translation of a journal article cited in ATLA.
  • There are several US agencies that regularly translate foreign newspapers and journals. They do a good job with public affairs (political, economic, social, cultural) publications and with STM (scientific, technical and medical) literature, but make almost zero effort to cover humanities or religion in particular (unless it relates to terrorism!). There is very little chance any of these agencies has translated the theological article you are interested in, but here is one page that describes how to track these sources.