Last Updated on October 21, 2021
Learning Chinese, but still can’t understand a certain part of a text? This article discusses some of the best free online Chinese translators.
translate.google.com
Google’s translate service can translate entire websites using a URL, or translate an unlimited sized text pasted into it. It is now very interactive, and can automatically detect the language that you paste into the input box. This is probably the best of the online translators on the web. In addition to translating from Chinese to English and vice versa, it can translate to and from Chinese in more than 20 different languages. Another very cool feature about this is if you are going from Chinese to another language, and you want to use Google’s method for Pinyin, just click on Chinese for the first language, and then click on “拼”, and you will be able to type in Pinyin. You can even use Google Translate to draw Chinese Characters through your browser, and then translate that way. You can learn how to do that with this article. I think this is the best free online translator for translating from Chinese into a foreign language. Note though, if you want to translate to Chinese from another language, I would probably recommend either Baidu’s or Youdao’s translator.
fanyi.baidu.com
baidu.com is the number one site in Mainland China, and Baidu’s translation service is located at fanyi.baidu.com. The fanyi part of fanyi.baidu.com comes from 翻译 (fan1 yi4) meaning to translate. This is a very good translator that allows you to look up words or translate entire paragraphs with no size limits. I think that this is the top free online translator from a Chinese company. As of the 30 October 2017, this site can translate between 28 different languages including Chinese and English, Korean, Spanish, Arabic, Japanese, Russian, French, and Thai. By default this site translates from the detected language into Mandarin Chinese. This service allows you to translate entire websites via their URL into Chinese. To translate an entire URL into Chinese, just paste the URL, and click on the button “翻译”. One additional interesting feature is often when you wanting something translated, it will give you real examples of things similar to what want translated. Additionally, I really like the feature that allows you to translate between Cantonese(粤语) and Mandarin.
fanyi.youdao.com
This is another excellent online translator from a Chinese company. This site can translate between Mandarin and 7 other other languages including English, Korean, Spanish, Japanese, Russian, and French. Although I prefer Baidu’s translator and Google’s translator, this is a site that I used to check from time to time to double-check translations.
bing.com/translator
This is Microsoft’s online translator using Bing technology. This site is quite similar to Google’s translation site. This is a fabulous site for translating to and from Chinese from many languages. It allows you to translate text that you paste into the site, or have an entire URL translated for you. You can even have the translation spoken to you.
translate.yandex.com
Last but not least, is Yandex’s translator translate.yandex.com. yandex.com, which is in English, is actually quite a good alternative to google.com. Yandex’s translate service currently can translate between Chinese and over 80 different languages. With this service, you can even translate into languages that Google doesn’t translate into.
Do you use any of these online translators? Do you have anything to add? Let’s discuss it in the comments below.
i use https://www.yellowbridge.com/chinese/annotator.php most of the time, it doesnt translate but does give you definitions of each word and how to pronounce them. yellow bridge also has alot of other good resources for learning chinese. currently studying traditional so i like this website
Thanks for the comment. Yellowbridge is also a very good resource. I think I’ve also used the annotator in the past. It seems to be quite good. I like how hovering over various Chinese words will give you the Pinyin and definition(s).
need english to mandarin/Cantonese and vice versa—
I just found a really good translator for English to Cantonese.
It is https://tradukka.com/translate/yue
Thanks for this article. I too like to practice with hover-over annotations. Similar to yellowbridge annotator:
https://mandarinspot.com/annotate
it also has a feature where you can add annotations to any page without having to copy/paste the text. In short, you add a special bookmark in your browser, and when you open a Mandarin website, click that bookmark, and it’ll add the annotations to that entire page:
https://mandarinspot.com/bookmark
I remember some years ago Google Translate also did this awesome function… But now, it doesn’t do it. Just translate all the words and sentence.
Do you remember? Is there any option to activate it in Google Translate?
It would be awesome for me…
I’m trying to translate a chapter out of a Chinese book that’s in paper rather than electronic form. How do you get an online translator, like the ones you discuss, handle that?
That situation is harder. You will need some way to scan the paper into text. Maybe you could use a scanner, or take photos with a camera and have some way to convert those photos into text. Sure, there are many ways you could scan a book, but you want the text from it so you could paste it into translating software. You might want to check out this link which talks about something similar https://www.quora.com/How-do-you-scan-a-large-book-to-extract-the-text-out-of-it
But, make sure it can support Chinese Characters. No matter what though, I think this would be time consuming.
If you have a Samsung phone with Bixby you can open the Bixby camera and it will translate the text in real-time. You don’t even have to take a picture. Just hold the phone over the chapter and it will tell you what it says. I am not sure if you can download Bixby on a non-Samsung phone. But it’s worth a try!
Thanks for that info. I should check out Bixby.
To scan a pdf document with OCR (optical character recognition), try the PDF ELEMENT application/website.
Try using Yandex Translate. It allows you to upload pictures, scan them and translate the text.
I womder why such an important feature of Yandex Translate was omitted. In all honesty, photo-translation is the only reason I use Yandex Translate instead of Google translate 🙂
this is a good
https://kafeniaz.com
Thanks.
I am interested in why words translated from a non-roman language like chinese are not given their phonetic roman equivalent? Why isn’t hsieh spelt shway? There seems no logical reason. Chinese characters translated to roman letters do not require non-phonetic spelling. Can you help, please?
Hello. This is actually a complicated question. There are many sounds in Chinese that don’t exist in English and likewise many sounds in English that don’t exist in Chinese.
X (from Pinyin) in Mandarin is similar to sh in English, but not exactly the the same. The tongue positions to make the sounds are different, and there are other differences.
hsieh comes from Wade-Giles. Wade-Giles was invented by 2 men: Thomas Wade and Herbert Giles. Both these men were brilliant Sinologists, and their system was one of the first romanisation systems invented for Chinese to Western languages. hsieh exactly maps to xie in Pinyin. There are actually 2 main Romanisation systems used today: Pinyin (used in Mainland China), and Wade-Giles which is still used in Taiwan and before Mainland China became communist.
hsieh is actually very logical. You just need to learn about how Wade-giles sets up the transliteration. I made a Wade-giles to Pinyin conversion table which you can see below.
https://mandarinportal.com/pinyin-wade-giles-conversion-table/
Below is a Wade-Giles to Pinyin conversion table
https://mandarinportal.com/wade-giles-pinyin-conversion-table/
One of the huge issues with Wade-Giles is that apostrophes are critical with system. If one incorrectly uses apostrophes or omits them, it would represent totally different sounds. So, if people are lazy with them, it creates problems. For example, ch’a and cha represent different sounds in Wade-Giles. They correspond to zha and cha in Pinyin.
Additionally, it is nearly impossible to perfectly transliterate Chinese into Western languages because Chinese is a tonal language, but most Western languages are not. So, if just the sound is transliterated, but the tone dropped, you lose a lot. I actually think Wade-Giles is more scientific than Pinyin. Wade-Giles uses diacritics, including ê, û, and ü.
The reason Pinyin is used more now is largely for historical and political reasons. Taiwan also uses Bopomofo, but it is basically never used to transliterate into English. It is used to teach people the phonetics of Mandarin so then they can learn Chinese Characters.
Hsieh and shway are two entirely different words. Hsieh is based on the Wade-Giles transliteration scheme, developed in the 19th century. Today’s worldwide standard is Pinyin, developed in the mid 20th century. It works really well. Learn the rules for Pinyin and you’ll be able to pronounce Mandarin fairly well. Hsieh in Wade-Giles and xie in Pinyin are pronounced exactly the same; they’re just spelled differently. Learn Pinyin and you’ll do well.
I just saw sinocelt’s explanation below. He/she is spot on. Learn Pinyin, make sure you learn the tones, and you’ll do well.
OMG, Dan Collins, you have asked some great questions, but they cannot be answered in one simple paragraph. As I am an amateur language hobbyist, this is a topic near and dear to my heart. E.g., how do you pronounce “ough” in
/oʊ/ as in though (cf. toe).
/uː/ as in through (cf. true).
/ʌf/ as in rough (cf. ruffian).
/ɒf/ as in cough (cf. coffin).
/ɔː/ as in thought (cf. taut).
/aʊ/ as in bough (cf. cow)?
So when you say “phonetic roman equivalent,” I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about. Transliteration is the ATTEMPT to represent the sounds of one language into the sounds and spelling schemes of your language. E.g., if your first language is English, the transliteration scheme will be A LOT different if your first language is Spanish. As you probably know, the Spanish phonetic and spelling system is A LOT more consistent than that of English.
Hsieh and shway are entirely different groups of words in Mandarin. Pinyin is today’s standard of representing the sounds of the Mandarin language. Hsieh, spelled xie in today’s Pinyin, is based on the Wade-Giles transliteration scheme developed in the 1800s. Shway is based on English’s inconsistencies. It’s spelled shui in today’s Pinyin, and is pronounced entirely differently from hsieh (xie). And we haven’t even discussed tones yet. Xiē, (pronounced with a high level tone), and xié (rising tone), and xiě (falling-rising tone), and xiè (falling tone) all represent four separate GROUPS of words and meanings.
Learn the rules of Pinyin, and that will help you so much to learn the proper pronunciation of Mandarin Chinese.
I’ve tried half a dozen English to Chinese online translators. The two I get the best results from, meaning the translators do not alter words or add unwanted spaces in unusual made up words are Bing.com and MDBG.net. The Google translator always alters my original English made up words. Why use made up words? Because some names for website addresses are made up with no literal English meaning.
I also like MDBG, but it is not really a translator. It is a dictionary, and you can actually download the CC-CEDICT of which MDBG is based, at https://www.mdbg.net/chinese/dictionary?page=cc-cedict
i am super confused,
i just want a translator that can accurately translate English to Chinese, but almost all the ones i found including the ones listed here always alters my words, sentences and on some instance the entire message i am trying to pass,
this is frustrating because most times i will have to translate numerous time before reaching a satisfactory result or in some cases i combine so many translators and use the one that is closest in accuracy,
i just want one translator that can be reliably accurate, any help?
I think the best translator for English to Chinese would be Baidu’s translator. But Google Translate for English to Chinese should also be good. I think the best translator for Chinese to English is Google Translate.
Unfortunately, you aren’t going to find any machine or computer translator that translates perfectly. The best translators are still human professional translators.
I think you can use these translation tools to get a rough idea of what something is about. Sometimes I’ll use Google Translate, and assume it’s somewhere between 80-90% accurate.
Machines can translate far more content and far faster than any human can, but the quality might not be as good. So, use these sites to get rough ideas of the meanings, and get a professional translator to have a nearly perfect translation.
This is a test