With the current increase in globalization, there is a need for the development of translation services that can remove language barriers that normally hinder effective communication between people.

Fortunately, there are several translation software that have been developed to make the process of translating web pages, phrases, and words painless.

What’s more, some of the software have exposed their Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to enable developers to integrate their features and incorporate translation capabilities into their own applications—without building them from scratch.

To assist you in making the best decision on the most suitable API to use, we reviewed several translation APIs based on the following four main criteria:

• API features: We evaluated the outstanding features of each of the translation APIs
• Supported languages: We assessed the languages that each of the APIs support.
• Pricing: We analyzed the cost of integrating each of the APIs into applications.
• Ease of use: We looked at the ease of using each of the APIs.

Eventually, we developed the following list of the top 10 best translation APIs:

• Google Translate API
• Microsoft Translator API
• Yandex Translate API
• Text Translation API
• Linguatools Translate API
• My Translator Pro API
• IBM Watson Language Translator API
• Dictionary Translation Hablaa API
• WordProbe API
• SYSTRAN.io API

Top 10 Best Translation APIs

TL;DR: Here’s a table that summarizes our key findings.

1. Google Translate API

The Google Translate API lets you leverage Google’s powerful cloud-based machine learning technology to translate texts between languages automatically.

API features: With the Google Translate API, you can quickly translate a string of text from one language to the other. Furthermore, when the source language is not known, the API can detect the language.

Supported languages: The API supports more than 100 languages.

Pricing: You can use some features of the Google Translate API for free. However, some features are priced monthly depending on the extent of usage.

Ease of use: Just like with other Google’s products, the Translate API is well documented with lots of integration samples, which makes it easy to use. Furthermore, there is also a vibrant community to assist you with any integration challenges.

2. Microsoft Translator API

The Microsoft Translator Text API allows you to harness Microsoft’s machine translation technology for creating applications capable of providing multi-language support.

API features: Apart from allowing you to translate text into multiple languages, the Microsoft Translator API comes with features for automatically detecting the language of the source text, transliterating words and sentences from one script to the other, and bilingual dictionary capabilities for showing alternative translations from or to the English language.

Supported languages: The API supports more than 60 languages.

Pricing: You can access some limited features of the API for free. However, for more extended usage, you can subscribe to any of its pay-as-you-go pricing tiers.

Ease of use: Microsoft provides quick-start guides, tutorials, and other helpful resources to help you in making the most of the API.

3. Yandex Translate API

The Yandex Translate API offers programmatic access to the Yandex cloud-based machine translation service for easier embedding in mobile or web applications.

API features: With the Yandex Translate API, you can automatically translate separate words, complete small texts, or huge quantities of text such as technical documentation. The API also comes with features for predictive typing, pronunciation and usage examples, dictionary with transcription, and many others.

Supported languages: The API supports more than 90 languages.

Pricing: The API is priced monthly according to the number of characters provided in the request. The minimum amount is $15 per month for less than 50,000,000 characters.

Ease of use: Yandex provides comprehensive documentation, detailed descriptions, and other helper materials to help you in consuming the API with ease.

4. Text Translation API

The Text Translation API is a simple API that allows you to easily translate texts from one language to the other.

API features: With the Text Translation API, you can complete translations from one supported language to the other supported language. Furthermore, the API allows you to translate text in an HTML web page to another language. You can specify the HTML tags to be extracted and translated.

Supported languages: The API supports more than 12 languages.

Pricing: As long as you make less than 5 requests per day, you can use the API for free. For increased usage, you can go for any of its paid plans, which starts from $20 per month to more than $75 per month.

Ease of use: There is simple documentation to help you in getting up and running with the API as fast as possible.

5. Linguatools Translate API

The Linguatools Translate API searches for a word in a bilingual dictionary and returns its translations that are ordered according to frequency.

API features: With the Linguatools Translate API, you can complete translations from and to the German language for other six languages. You can filter the API results according to word class or minimum frequency.

Supported languages: The API supports translations from and to the German language for different languages, such as English, Dutch, Czech, Spanish, Italian, and Polish.

Pricing: The Linguatools Translate API is available for free, but you’ll be restricted to 1,000 requests per month. For more extended usage, you can go for any of its paid plans, which starts from $4.90 per month to more than $24.90 per month.

Ease of use: There is simple documentation to assist you in integrating the API into your application with ease.

6. My Translator Pro API

The My Translator Pro API is an easy to use API for carrying out text translations.

API features: The My Translator Pro API lets you access top-notch translation technology for accurately translating texts from one language to the other. Furthermore, if the source language is not defined, the API automatically detects it.

Supported languages: The API supports more than 64 languages.

Pricing: With the free version of the API, you can make up to 11,000 requests per month. The paid options are priced at $269 per month and $469 per month.

Ease of use: The API comes with simple and easy to follow documentation to enable faster integration.

7. IBM Watson Language Translator API

The IBM Watson Language Translator API allows you to tap into the powerful IBM neural machine translation technology and translate texts from one language to another.

API features: With the IBM Watson Language Translator API, you can easily translate texts to different languages. The API comes with several domain-specific models that increase the speed and accuracy of the translations. Furthermore, you can customize your translations according to your preferred terminology and language.

Supported languages: The API supports more than 20 languages.

Pricing: You can use the API for free for translating up to 1 million characters per month. For extended usage, you can go for any of its paid plans.

Ease of use: IBM is known for providing comprehensive developer documentation and other helpful resources to make its API services easy to consume, and this API is no exception.

8. Dictionary Translation Hablaa API

The Dictionary Translation Hablaa API is a simple API that allows you to make translations without any hassles.

API features: With the Dictionary Translation Hablaa API, you can translate words from and into a wide variety of languages. After defining the source and target languages, as well as the words that require translation, the results will be automatically displayed. The API also allows you to request multiple example sentences of the words to be translated and request translations of similar words.

Supported languages: The API supports more than 160 languages.

Pricing: It is available for free.

Ease of use: The API requires no authentication, which makes it easy and fun to integrate into applications.

9. WordProbe API

The WordProbe API allows you to carry out instant translations of words and phrases.

API features: Besides translating texts, you can use the API for getting the synonyms and antonyms of words. It has a large thesaurus library having more than 275,000 related words, antonyms, synonyms, and idiomatic phrases.

Supported languages: The WordProbe API supports six languages, which are Arabic, Spanish, Chinese, German, Spanish, and French.

Pricing: If you make less than 1,500 requests per day, you can use the API for free. The paid pricing plans start from $5 per month to $25 per month, and lets you make more requests per day.

Ease of use: There is simple documentation that makes it easy to get up and running with the API within a few minutes.

10. SYSTRAN.io Translation API

SYSTRAN is a company that provides a wide range of API services, which you can use to bring spectacular language processing capabilities to your applications.

API features: The SYSTRAN.io Translation API gives you programmatic access to SYSTRAN’s machine translation technology for automatically translating documents from one language to the other. The API can also identify the language of the source document, in case it’s not defined.

Supported languages: The API supports more than 130 languages.

Pricing: If you are making requests in small volumes, you can use the API for free. Otherwise, monthly subscriptions are provided for large volumes.

Ease of use: SYSTRAN provides detailed documentation and code samples to make it easy integrating the API into apps and websites.

That’s Rakuten RapidAPI’s list of the Top 10 Best Translation APIs. We hope you’ll find an API that you can use to add multi-language capabilities to your applications.

You can click here to search for other amazing translation APIs on our platform.

About Rakuten RapidAPI

Rakuten RapidAPI is the world’s largest API marketplace with 8,000+ third-party APIs and used by over 500,000 active developers. We enable developers to build transformative apps through the power of APIs. Find, test and connect to all the APIs you need in one place!

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