Five Online English-French Translation Tools
Life is most certainly getting the way of my good blogging intentions, so here’s a quick post with links to some useful French translation sites. It’s by no means exhaustive – more a way of me keeping track of the list I have so far – and I’ll update it in future, when I have more time.
My Top Five English-French Translation Tools
Stabouli
This is a new one to me but it looks interesting as it’s just an English-French translation tool. I haven’t had much chance to use it yet but I know that will change. With a few months of use behind me I hope to have some idea how it compares to other tools I’ve been using, nameley:
Reverso
http://www.reverso.net/text_translation.aspx?lang=EN
This is an excellent translation tool, far superior to Google, which really does come up with some dubious translations at times. Reverso also has an excellent dictionary, which gives context-based translations.
Google Translate
Google Translate is probably the least accurate but also the most convenient. Perhaps this is most useful in the web browser, allowing you to quickly translate a page from French (or any other language) into English. It’s not perfect but you can get the idea. If you’re using this for translation from English to French I recommend running your text through another translation tool as well and then cross-checking any differences. Google seems to simplify translation and doesn’t account for nuance. It’s the quick and dirty option.
Linguee
https://www.linguee.com/english-frenchL
Linguee is fantastic dictionary and als very useful for translating short phrases – definitely one of the best translation tools that’s out there given it takes context into account. There’s now a mobile app, which I’m yet to try out.
Cambridge Dictionary
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/translate/
Whenever James sees me using Google Translate he berates me for forgetting about the Cambridge Dictionary translation tool. This is his favourite. I use it as one of my go-tos for double-checking Google’s efforts.