There is no hard limit at the moment, but it’s recommended to keep the size of each individual item under 4kB. This corresponds to 4,000 characters encoded as UTF-8 and 2,000 characters encoded as UTF-16. Uploading longer texts won’t yield any errors, but might get refused by some external translation engines integrated in Localazy.

We can gauge how good a Machine Translation Engine is by the accuracy of the translation, conciseness, consistency of output, and how many language pairs they offer.

Localazy offers four major machine translation engines to use when translating your content (available with the Additional MT feature enabled).

Use English, which is unquestionably the best language to pair with another language for machine translations because translations from and to English give the best results overall. That’s why it is also a good idea to select English as the source language for your projects in Localazy.

As for the engine itself, each one has its pros and cons:

• Google Translate is the most popular and offers many languages and language pairs with a reasonably accurate translation, making it the best average option.
• DeepL is becoming quickly better and better and is great for more technical terms. It is usually also very concise but has a lower variety of language pairs.
• Amazon Translate still has a somewhat fluctuating quality; it can be very high or pretty low, but you can use it for free with Localazy.
• Microsoft Azure has fewer available language options and average quality.

The best thing you can do is combine and compare multiple machine translation outputs and decide on the best results with backward translations and other checks.

Machine Translations (MT) are an incredible invention that makes our life easier. But sometimes, their accuracy is low, and translating large amounts of texts will inevitably produce outputs of varying quality.

Translating strings to a language you don’t know well with MT engines can be a pain because you might not fully understand what’s truly in there.

What can you do to ensure consistent quality levels of machine translation output? Localazy offers some solutions you might want to consider:

• If you are conducting the translations yourself, try to use Additional MT Engines to get more suggestions, allowing you to compare and decide.
• If you don’t want to spend your time with machine translation post-editing and checking, try the Human-Assisted Machine Translations service by Localazy and get machine translations checked for a fair price per word.

The advantages of machine translation are:

• Multiple free translation engines as options, like Google, DeepL, etc
• A myriad of language pairs, from English-Portuguese to Russian-Zulu
• Instantaneous translations. You can translate in real-time.
• Machine learning mechanisms are improving, meaning that every day the services are getting better.

The disadvantages of machine translation:

• Language pairing accuracy without English can be very low, giving it some limitations
• Risk of incorrect translation.
• Translation Engines struggle with context while translating.
• Mistakes might create irreversible situations.

How to mitigate the disadvantages of MT?

Accuracy, context, and mistakes are solvable by using Human-assisted Machine Translation and Machine Translation + Post-Editing.

You can employ both of these methods while using Localazy to achieve the best possible quality of machine translations.