Help! Au secours! It can be frustrating, annoying and time consuming to get a short e-mail, Tweet or text message in a language that you can’t understand. Sometimes, as much as you need to know what the message says, you don’t want to or can’t afford to hire a professional translator. You also don’t want to leave the message up to interpretation by using an online translator.
If this sounds like you, you might want to explore your options a bit and consider some alternative (and lesser known!) translation resources offered to the online community at no charge. A number of websites have recently popped up that you can visit to get help with a short translation that isn’t computer generated and that you don’t have to pay for.
One of the best sites we have found providing free human-powered translations is Sylang, a France-based website that coordinates volunteer translators from around the world to perform short English to French and French to English translation requests submitted via its website.
The site has a number of helpful features. Since translations are performed by human translators and sent via e-mail, users must verify their e-mail address to ensure the translation actually reaches its intended recipient. Although demand varies widely, the site provides a service status indicator and the estimated time for delivery of a new English-French or French-English translation. Presumably, if you can’t wait the time it will take to process and perform your translation, you probably shouldn’t submit your translation request.
Sounds great, doesn’t it? Of course, the site does have certain restrictions and conditions of use, including:
- your translation request must be coherent: the site will refuse submissions that simply contain individual words, lists of words, or fragments of text without context (use a bilingual dictionary for individual words or terms!)
- your translation request is limited to 300 characters; however, you can submit up to two translation requests in a 24-hour period (or a total of 600 characters per day)
- you cannot request translations of certain types of documents, including school homework; legal text or information; historical content or quotations; and songs, stories, poems or other copyrighted material
- you cannot request a translation of any confidential material
- you can only submit requests for the French and English languages (English to French or French to English, but no other language combinations).
If you’re a professional translator or a bilingual subject matter expert interested in practicing your translation skills, you can volunteer as a translator on the site. You fill out a profile and set the number of 300-character translations you want to perform in a day. You can change your notification settings at any time or even disable them if you go on holiday or become too busy to handle them.
If you’re a professional translator, volunteering can give you a nice change of pace and possibly expose you to other fields that you don’t normally specialize in. If you’re not a professional translator but have solid language skills and enjoy translating, this site can give you a little taste of what it is like to work as a translator, help build your translator’s profile, and especially, allow you to give back to the global village by helping individuals from different backgrounds communicate with one another.
