Choose an MT engine

Explore Smartcats translation engines for instant translations of diverse content types, with intelligent routing for language pairs and customizable backup options.

Smartcat has eight industry-leading translation engines that are used to instantly translations, whether that be for files, websites, software, designs, videos – anything you need translated can first be pre-translated with high accuracy.

The machine translation engines are:

  • Google Statistical MT

  • Google Neural MT

  • Microsoft Translator - This includes statistical and neural engines depending on the language pair.

  • Yandex MT

  • Baidu Translate API

  • DeepL

  • Amazon Translate

  • ModernMT

Intelligent routing analyzes your text and selects the best translation engine for the specific language pair.

When you translate a document or create a translation project, you can enable intelligent routing or select translation engine (available for Unite subscribers and higher). Watch the video or read through the steps as described below the video:

  1. When translating a document: click on the Advanced settings when creating translation and select the desired Provider for machine translation in the window that opens. Press Apply now.

  1. When creating a translation project: open the Linguistic assets list from your account homepage or from the projects Overview page, click on the gear icon in the machine translation section and adjust the settings in the window that opens. Press Save&Run.

3. It is possible to select a different engine for each language. By clicking Add option, you can add languages to a specific engine.

Each engine supports a specific number of languages. So some MT engines may become unavailable if there is no coverage from these engines.

Backup machine translation engine

We also have a feature that greatly improves the pre-translation performance! If the default machine translation engine provides an empty or broken result, meaning there is a critical error show in the Smartcat Editor, the platform will automatically fall back to its second machine translation engine option, that being Google Neural Machine Translation (NMT). As such, you won't have to worry about errors (or rather, this will decrease significantly).

FAQ

Which MT engine is best for my projects?

There is no good answer to this question as the final choice of an MT engine might come down to many possible factor. For example, some MT engines produce better results for a specific language pair or if equally capable, results might be affected by the topic. Some companies publish some analysis of MT output and rank engines for some language pairs. One such company is inten.to, and they post some results on a regular basis. The latest study is available here.

Studies like this one might give some insights into what engine is better for some language pairs, but when dealing with a large project, users should perform some testing with their translation teams and collect some feedback. The perception from translators might vary from the automated results generated for the studies. Testing a couple of thousand words with selected engines should be sufficient in most cases.

I already have an MT account with Google/Microsoft. Can I use it with Smartcat?

If you have accounts for the custom Microsoft and Google MT engines you can connect them to Smartcat.
To do so you need to provide your credentials in the Workspace settings section and contact our support team.

Once the accounts are connected, the corresponding MT engines will be available for use among the rest of Smartcat translation engines. 
The words translated using these engines will be deducted from your Smartwords balance, as per usual. 

What machine translation engines are integrated with Smartcat?

The following engines are integrated with Smartcat.

  • Google Statistical MT

  • Google Neural MT

  • Microsoft Translator - This includes statistical and neural engines depending on the language pair.

  • Yandex MT

  • Baidu Translate API

  • DeepL

  • Amazon Translate

  • ModernMT

To learn more about selecting a translation engine, refer to this article