Last updated on 12 May 2026
Online translation tools have improved well over time. If they still suffer from a bad reputation, we are very far from machine translations at least risky, even wacky. Artificial intelligence has gone through this. Engineers have improved their algorithms and especially online translators have gradually learned from the corrections made by the users themselves.
We are still far from the perfect tool, but the proposed translations have gained in quality and relevance. Here are three quality tools that deserve a try or a new trial if you haven't tested them in a while.
Table of Contents
DeepL
This is undoubtedly the best I think of this podium. I have already said here all the good I think. DeepL is an intelligent automatic translator. Its results are in a much more natural and less robotic language than its competitors. DeepL offers no less than 42 combinations from seven languages: French, English, German, Spanish, Italian, Polish and Dutch. And this is not over, the designers of the project announce other languages such as Mandarin, Japanese or Russian. Another advantage of DeepL is that it works at lightning speed. Its designers have invested in ultra-vitamin servers that give it incomparable computing power.
Link: DeepL
Microsoft Translator
The machine translation tool offered by Microsoft has great ambitions and good chances of becoming unavoidable. This is already a bit the case. Translator is an extremely powerful tool that ideally integrates with applications in the Microsoft ecosystem. It translates on the fly in more than 40 languages. Small originality, Microsoft Translator also offers a live conversation function. It allows from the site to have a live conversation with people who speak another language. Every time you say or write a sentence, it appears translated into their languages respective to the other participants. Bluffing.
Link: Microsoft Translator
Google Translate
It is difficult not to include Google’s machine translation tool on this podium. Forget about the past and the first translations of a few years ago. Google Translate has also evolved a lot lately. It has become the most widely used tool in the world. This is not entirely by chance. Google Translate instantly translates words, sentences, and even entire pages of a website into more than 100 languages. It's a must.
Link: Google Translate
Three essential tools that are included in the list of Best online translation tools to discover here.
English
For sharp translations with technical, scientific, business jargon terms, the results with DeepL and other online translators like Google Translate, Bing translator are not always very relevant.
In this case you can try TechDico, https://www.techdico.com, in 28 languages, which offers translations classified by field of activity, in order to identify more quickly the most suitable translation.
I recommended Deep L to my students because it is really good because it is very fast and rather ‘smart’ unlike other translation sites. In addition, in the banner at the top of the page, he also refers to Linguee, who is also recommended because he offers translations in context, which allows students to realize that they should never make word for word. Definitely two good tools.
Between Google Translate and DeepL, one would have to try a lot of random examples of translation to see if a trend really emerges, but it would not be possible to prove that the examples of such a study would be chosen randomly and not in an interested way. I have the impression that there is the effect of the “all new, all beautiful” for DeepL, and the bad reputation that Google Translate has dragged on for years following its disappointing beginnings, when it has made huge progress since then, and is often satisfying today.
Automatic translators can be useful for a first draft to rework, or rather reliable for technical (but not literary) translations. That said, I think that in order to avoid any translation errors, it is best not to use an automatic translator, but rather translation tools (the translator is the human) such as monolingual dictionaries, bilingual dictionaries, synonym dictionaries, thesaurus, encyclopaedias, corpuses of well-written texts, or correctly selected translation directories, such as the reft.fr approach, which is satisfied with French and English, but for the sake of reliability on selections of human translations.
Yes, it is impossible to do without Deepl when working with languages, it is really a fantastic tool. The important thing is also to ‘help’ Deepl and to offer fairly simple structures in language 1. The smoother the starting text, the better the translation. No miracles. An essential observation that must push us to review our structures or sentences in language 1 according to language 2.