Good but not Great

This plugin is not bad insofar as it offers auto machine translation using the free Google translation service. In fact, IMO its the only free plugin that does this well as it doesn’t place an artificial limit on the number of words translated.

However, I can only give this plugin two stars because the free version has some serious shortcomings. They are:

(1) It only uses the Google translation service with early auto machine translation technology which is not very accurate. For example, testing one paragraph from English to French I got 4 differences between the original and translated text. Multiply that by 100’s of paragraphs and it is a problem.

(2) The premium version of the plugin does offer Neural Machine Translation (NMT) using Google Translation. This is the next gen auto text machine translation service which GTranslate notes is near perfect human translation. It even markets it’s premium version referencing that fact. I’m not sure why NMT is not also being used for the free plugin. Perhaps GTranslate can explain, but right now I would have to use the paid version of the plugin to get NMT.

(3) The free version doesn’t use Microsoft’s translation service. I understand that Bing translation has been discontinued, but it has been replaced by Microsoft’s next generation AI text translation service, Azure Technology. Users can get a free Azure account and API key that offers 2 million character translations per month at no cost. That’s between 30,000 and 50,000 words each month! The premium version of GTranslate lets users use their own Google API key, so why not allow users to use an Azure API key to take full advantage of the free offer by Microsoft? Again, I don’t know the reason, maybe GTranslate can explain why.

So while I really like the GTranslate free plugin it shortcomings are significant as it does not use NMT and doesn’t enable users to take advantage of the Azure NMT free offering. To get NMT I would have to subscribe to the paid version and use Google NMT. Google has also has a free account but it is limited to 500,000 characters per month, so in effect I would end up paying a subscription to GTranslate and also a fee to Google once the character limit is exceeded.

Given the practical limitations on the free version, the use of pre-NMT tech and the fact that I can’t take full advantage of the Azure free auto NMT offering means I cannot give this plugin a better rating.