In this article, we will introduce our top 10 Machine Translation APIs and how to choose and access the right engine according to your data.
What is Machine Translation?
What does Machine Translation do?
Machine Translation (MT) or automated translation is a process when a computer software translates text from one language to another without human involvement. There are three types of machine translation methods: rule-based, statistical and neural networks. Current machine translation software often allows for customization by domain or profession, improving output by limiting the scope of allowable substitutions.
A brief history of Machine Translation methods
In 1951, Yehoshua Bar-Hillel was the first researcher in Machine Translation. He began his research at MIT. A Georgetown University MT research team followed with a public demonstration of its Georgetown-IBM experiment system in 1954.
During the 60s, researchers continued to study Machine Translation but actual progress was quite slow. Beginning in the late 1980s, as computational power increased and became less expensive, more interest was shown in statistical models for Machine Translation. It became more popular after the advent of computers. Various computer based translation companies were launched, including Trados.
By 1996, Machine Translation on the web started with SYSTRAN offering free translation of small texts (1996). The second free translation service on the web was Lernout & Hauspie’s GlobaLink. More innovations during this time included MOSES, the open-source statistical Machine Translation engine (2007), a text/SMS translation service for mobiles in Japan (2008), and a mobile phone with built-in speech-to-speech translation functionality for English, Japanese and Chinese (2009).
In 2012, Google announced that Google Translate can translate roughly enough text to fill 1 million books in one day.
Top 10 Machine Translation APIs
1. AWS — Available on Eden AI
Amazon Translate is a neural machine translation service that delivers fast, high-quality, affordable, and customizable language translation. With Amazon Translate, you can localize content such as websites and applications for your diverse users, easily translate large volumes of text for analysis, and efficiently enable cross-lingual communication between users.
2. DeepL — Available on Eden AI
DeepL is a deep learning company that develops AI systems for languages and communication. DeepL employs a dedicated team of machine learning researchers, developers and language experts, who all appreciate the importance of communication in a multilingual world and understand the complexity of automated translation.
3. Google Cloud — Available on Eden AI
Translation API Basic uses Google’s neural machine translation technology to instantly translate texts into more than one hundred languages. Translation API Advanced offers the same fast, dynamic results you get with Basic and additional customization features.
4. IBM Waston — Available on Eden AI
Watson’s API can translate text from one language to another. The service offers multiple domain-specific models. It allows you to customize translations based on terminology and language with forced glossary, parallel phrases, and corpus-level customization.
5. Microsoft Azure — Available on Eden AI
Microsoft Translator has the ability to translate text instantly or in batch across more than 100 languages, powered by the latest innovations in machine translation. It also supports a wide range of use cases, such as translation for call centers, multilingual conversational agents, or in-app communication.
6. ModernMT — Available on Eden AI
ModernMT is a self-learning machine translation service that improves from your corrections as you keep using it. You can also upload your own translation memories to train your MT engine.
7. Neural Space — Available on Eden AI
Neural Space uses the latest artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques to deliver fast, accurate, and highly customizable translations in multiple languages. With a focus on delivering high-quality results and a commitment to meeting the unique needs of each customer, Neural Space is the ideal partner for all your machine translation needs.
8. OpenAI — Available on Eden AI
With advanced machine learning algorithms and vast amounts of training data, OpenAI’s Machine Translation delivers highly accurate translations in multiple languages. The API is also flexible and scalable, allowing organizations to customize it to their specific needs and handle large amounts of text data efficiently.
9. Phedone — Available on Eden AI
Phedone’s Machine Translation API, as a SaaS tool based on AI and Collective Intelligence, can offer several advantages over other machine translation models on the market. These advantages may include the use of collective intelligence to provide more accurate translations, customization options to meet specific organizational needs, and a user-friendly interface.
10. Systran
Systran provides global companies with neural machine translation tools that enable secure communication and team collaboration worldwide. With document translation or live chat real-time translation, Systran helps your employees overcome the language barrier while respecting the highest standards of data privacy.
Some Machine Translation API use cases
You can use Machine Translation in numerous fields. Here are some examples of common use cases:
- Business: expand their reach into new markets and increase their customer base by enabling them to communicate effectively with clients in other countries.
- Education: facilitate cross-cultural exchange and collaboration in education, allowing students and teachers to communicate and learn from each other regardless of language barriers.
- Government and Public Services: improve cross-border communication and cooperation between governments and public services, enabling faster and more efficient responses to emergencies and other crises.
- Tourism: help travel and hospitality industries to better serve travelers and tourists from different countries, improving the travel experience for everyone.
- Communication: help decrease or even eliminate the language barrier in communication. A translation of the text can be obtained quickly and in a form that enables the recipients to understand the core content of the message
Why choose Eden AI to manage your APIs
Companies and developers from a wide range of industries (Social Media, Retail, Health, Finances, Law, etc.) use Eden AI’s unique API to easily integrate Machine Translation tasks in their cloud-based applications, without having to build their own solutions.
Eden AI offers multiple AI APIs on its platform amongst several technologies: Text-to-Speech, Logo Detection, Sentiment analysis API, Summarization, Question Answering, Data Anonymization, Speech recognition, and so forth.
We want our users to have access to multiple Machine Translation engines and manage them in one place so they can reach high performance, optimize cost and cover all their needs. There are many reasons for using multiple APIs:
Fallback provider is the ABCs
You need to set up a provider API that is requested if and only if the main Machine Translation API does not perform well (or is down). You can use confidence score returned or other methods to check provider accuracy.
Performance optimization.
After the testing phase, you will be able to build a mapping of providers performance based on the criteria you have chosen (languages, fields, etc.). Each data that you need to process will then be sent to the best Machine Translation API.
Cost — Performance ratio optimization.
You can choose the cheapest Machine Translation provider that performs well for your data.
Combine multiple AI APIs.
This approach is required if you look for extremely high accuracy. The combination leads to higher costs but allows your AI service to be safe and accurate because Machine Translation APIs will validate and invalidate each other for each piece of data.
How Eden AI can help you?
Eden AI has been made for multiple AI APIs use. Eden AI is the future of AI usage in companies. Eden AI allows you to call multiple AI APIs.
- Centralized and fully monitored billing on Eden AI for all Machine Translation APIs
- Unified API for all providers: simple and standard to use, quick switch between providers, access to the specific features of each provider
- Standardized response format: the JSON output format is the same for all suppliers thanks to Eden AI’s standardization work. The response elements are also standardized thanks to Eden AI’s powerful matching algorithms.
- The best Artificial Intelligence APIs in the market are available: big cloud providers (Google, AWS, Microsoft, and more specialized engines)
- Data protection: Eden AI will not store or use any data. Possibility to filter to use only GDPR engines.
You can see Eden AI documentation here.
Next step in your project
The Eden AI team can help you with your Machine Translation integration project. This can be done by :
- Organizing a product demo and a discussion to better understand your needs. You can book a time slot here: Contact
- By testing the public version of Eden AI for free: however, not all providers are available on this version. Some are only available on the Enterprise version.
- By benefiting from the support and advice of a team of experts to find the optimal combination of providers according to the specifics of your needs
- Having the possibility to integrate on a third-party platform: we can quickly develop connectors
