While official document translations, medical translations, and legal translations all require a highly trained language expert with real-world experience, there are many other reasons why one might require a translation without needing a high-level expert. For example, a small cafe that often caters to tourists may not want to consult a professional translator every time they add a new themed item to their menu. For these more casual translation needs, there are plenty of tools available that can handle most of what you would require with only minor mistakes and issues. For those looking to tackle substantial projects with vast volumes of materials, a blend of human and machine translation is often ideal. We will look at a handful of free translation tools that people are using to help accomplish small tasks and augment their ability to tackle much larger projects.

Many people confuse the word translation with transcription and vice versa. The source of a transcription job may be sign language, audio, and video formats, or even written (pdf) files. In transcription, a spoken sentence is written in the same language and not converted into another. When an English sentence is transformed into German and any different language, the process is called translation. In translation, however, a translator skilled in the source and translation language translates the source file into its exact equivalent in another language.