Until recently, I got a lot of use out of Google Translate. It worked great, it was fast, and its web page translations were good enough.
But then, something changed.
Now when I use Google Translate in Firefox to translate a certain URI, it seems to get stuck in some kind of loop and then craps out.
So I found a lovely alternative: Bing Translate!
So, this is what I get now with Google Translate:
Google Translate in Firefox - Nice, eh?
Isn’t that lovely?
No, it isn’t. In fact, it’s downright retarded. Sometimes I have to click Reload like 80 times, and then Google will finally lower itself to providing my non-Chrome web browser with a translated web page. Sometimes not…
So what happened?
Well, a few weeks ago I was searching for something totally unrelated, and I stumbled upon some blog somewhere (I can’t seem to find it again – sorry!) that included an interesting little tidbit.
Apparently, the theory is that Google made Google Translate not work properly in other browsers either on purpose, or in order to make it work beautifully in Google’s own Chrome browser, which of course has a nice integrated web page translation feature.
Well, I dunno. I do know that Google Translate works pretty well in IE8 and IE9, but it absolutely sucks in Firefox 3, 4, and 5. And it didn’t used to suck.
And frankly, I’d had enough. I mean, honestly people, even if the change wasn’t intentional, surely the good folks at Google test their web services in multiple browsers, right? It’s not like they don’t have the manpower or financial resources…
Enter Bing Translate, which can be found at http://www.microsofttranslator.com
Not only does it work just as well as Google Translate, but it has some added features that make Google Translate look old and busted!
And so, I present to you The New Hotness:
Bing Translate - The New Hotness!
First of all, it automagically detects the language of the web page you want to translate, and translates it into to English by default. Nice.
Then, you see those little buttons I circled in red in the image above? Well, they let you select one of 4 modes:
- Side-by-side comparison of the original and translated pages – with synchronized scrolling
- Top-and-bottom comparison of the original and translated pages – with synchronized scrolling
- Original page with mouse-over popup boxes showing the translated text for each sentence
- Translated page with mouse-over popup boxes showing the original text for each sentence
#4 is the default, and it’s uber-sassy.
Of course, no automatic translation is really worth a hill of beans, but still, I’ll take Bing Translate over Google Translate any day. At least it works in whatever browser I choose to use.
Finally, I have to say that I’m a bit surprised at Google’s lack of thought on this one. I mean, let’s face it: the only reason Google Images was upgraded recently was because Microsoft came out with Bing, and Bing Images was 10 times sassier than Google Images – even if the image search results weren’t quite as hot at first. So, Google was forced to update their service.
This whole “competition” thing is a good thing for us end users. I’m just not sure why the same thing hasn’t happened with Google Translate. Maybe they just haven’t gotten around to it yet…
I use google translator and bing translator to convert in one language to other language. So, when I translate one language to other, I can get google or bing get best translate. So I use them. But, i agree with you if you compared output display from google to bing. bing have nice display than google 🙂
I haven’t used bing. But… just today I realized something changed with google translate. It’s translating badly now…it wasn’t like this before. Thanks for this post. Here’s the output:
my words: calor,descontrol, contigo, me vuelve loco / contigo, siento calor,descontrol, me volver loco
google says: heat, lack of control, you, me crazy / you, I feel heat, lack of control, I go crazy
bing says:heat, lack of control, with you, crazy me/ with you, I feel heat, lack of control, I go crazy (correct)
google’s latin mode is worse: heat, descontrol, it happened, that I place vuelve / context, siento heat, descontrol, the place to debate me
FYI, google translate doesn’t even work in CHROME. Not directly from the settings or using the extension, so I guess their chickens came home to roost.
if you translate please do it correct!!!!!!!!
I dont know who is responsible foe the translation ….it’s never correct
I noticed that this is a pretty old article. Do you still feel the same way? Bing translate has failed me many times with absolutely terrible translations. Google translate does a much better job in terms of a proper translate.
Google Translate is still wonky sometimes, but I use them both equally. For some languages, MS does a better job. For others, Google is far better.
I just noticed today that Bing translate has taken over where Google translate used to be on some of my friends Facebook posts. First neither of them are perfect, whoever they have translating this stuff doesn’t know what their doing all that well…better than me but still not so well. I just wanted to say that in my opinion Bing is the worst of the two, after Bing translates it on Facebook it still makes no sense. So I then took it to Google, with their translation I was at least able to decipher what they were saying…Bing sucks.