Reviews

What To Look Out For When Choosing A Translation Software

Published

7 years ago

August 24, 2017

The world grows smaller every day. Through advances in technology, even modest and medium size companies now find themselves doing business with partners from other parts of the globe. Translation software makes international business communication possible by helping you to understand any email, document or website that comes across your desk in a language other than your own.

The best business translation software recognizes the language you are working with and allows you to convert an assortment of documents types to another language. It offers a variety of languages to choose from and provides good support and a user-friendly interface. It translates email seamlessly, allowing all parties to write in their choice of language and have the email delivered in the language of the recipient. It likewise converts all Word documents, Excel reports and PowerPoint presentations inside their native applications and from the original languages in which they were created.

Below are the criteria you can use to help you evaluate these translation software products:

Features
The best document translation software includes a variety of features that enhance your translation experience. Particularly useful features include instant language recognition, batch processing of file folders full of documents, text-to-speech capability to help you learn correct pronunciation and an integrated spell-checker.
Available Languages
Before comparing other software attributes, determine which software supports the languages your company requires. The range of supported languages in the translation software we review goes from one to ninety-nine. Some software contains all supported languages in a single product. Other programs, even those that support a high total number of languages, only offer language pairs English and Spanish for example as separately purchased products. Better translation software offers multilingual packages that contain several languages in one program.
Supported Formats & Files
If you plan to translate a wide variety of documents, you need a product that can manage a large selection of file formats. The best software allows you to work inside these various document formats, particularly the popular business programs in the Microsoft Suite. Being able to easily browse internet sites in other languages is also important for research and communication with overseas business partners. And while not many of these applications are Mac compatible, if this is a consideration, we also note that in this section.
Help & Support
The vast majority of software providers have telephone and email support, but some offer more convenient live chat as well. Each provides a range of other customer support options, like FAQs and user forums. In this section, we list details of these options along with ease-of-use information gathered during the live testing of each application.

Finally, consider the way you do business and the languages you use to communicate. The best translation software for you is the right combination of these features, languages, file formats and support options.