Blogging on Chrome OS: Translating texts in excellent quality
Introduction
Do you blog in several languages and want to use new AI-supported translation tools?
There are so many possibilities! Even on Chrome OS!
In this post, I want to introduce you to a Google solution fitting to Chrome OS and an alternative to it, which I use almost every day.
Over time, I will introduce more tools to you in the blog.
Important Notes
Disclaimer of liability: As always on this blog, I warn you that all changes to your system mentioned in this post are at your own risk! It is theoretically possible that there are system or application errors that could lead to data loss and further problems!
How to translate texts online on Chrome OS with Google Translate?
Google Translate is a powerful translation tool with excellent quality and is even free.
Google designed the user interface of the web application to be simple and self-explanatory:
Enter the text you want to translate in the left-field, and the tool will immediately try to translate it:
Sometimes the automatically detected source and target languages do not match with what you would expect. In this case, however, you can change the language by making the appropriate selection:
Now you can copy the translated text e.g., with the key combination Ctrl + C or with the corresponding button into the clipboard:
Then paste the content into your post with a right-click and “paste” or with the key combination Ctrl + V:
Here we go! Ready! Or not?
Often, unfortunately, not really. Although the translations are mostly grammatically correct, the text is quite unnatural. In rare cases, the translation is not accurate in every place. Then some rework is necessary. There are tools for this as well, which I will present here in the blog.
Another problem may be that you do not have an Internet connection, but you still want to translate one of your posts. Thanks to Play Store, this is no problem on Chrome OS! Because there you can find Google translate as an Android app.
How to translate texts on Chrome OS offline with Google Translate?
If you have installed Google translate from the Play Store, there is hardly any difference from translating text with Google Translate web application:
The Google translate app enables you to translate texts, even without an internet connection. When you start the application for the first time, it asks you if you want to download your system language and English as language pairs for offline use:
That is also possible with many other languages:
By the way, not only texts: you can also read out your text. For this, you have to “start a conversation:”
That also works very well nowadays!
By the way! Does the display in the app look a little different to you? Then you can change that here:
As with the Google translate web application, you can use the clipboard to copy your translated text into your post.
As a Google fan, I like both tools, but there is a great alternative that provides text in a more natural language. That makes a better impression on a blog and is easier to read. And it helps me as half of a technology freak 😉 Because sometimes I slip into a technical language which is of course too monotonous for non-experts and therefore possibly dull. So why not use new possibilities and optimize this? 🙂
How to translate texts on Chrome OS online with the DeepL translator?
Over the years, I have used several online translators. Then I read somewhere that the results of the DeepL translator, which was still unknown at that time, should offer on the one hand incredibly right and, on the other hand, very natural results.
The DeepL translator is available in one free and several paid versions that offer additional features.
Using the DeepL translator is very similar to using Google Translate:
Again, you can copy your results to the clipboard e.g., with the key combination Ctrl + C or with the corresponding button.
Why should you use a translator at all?
Well, if you are a born linguistic talent which can translate texts quickly in a very readable and natural language, you don’t need to use such tools! If you know a language very well, you hardly ever translate word by word, but you “think directly in the language.”
Little Offtopic: Book a language course or holiday of several weeks where you are forced to use another language without interruption. Then you will understand what I mean by that. All of a sudden, you are looking for words in your mother tongue, because the first word that comes to your mind is the word from the foreign language. 😉
Here, for example, at a language school in London, Leicester Square. Afterward I went to language schools in Malta, New York (in the Empire State Building), Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, and Singapore. Great trips. Kind people from all over the world. Great experiences. I can only recommend it!
I am not a language genius and therefore use all new opportunities that help me to efficiently and time-saving generate texts with the best possible language for my digital contents such as blogs.
The DeepL translator is so good at this that sometimes when I can’t think of excellent wording in my native language, I insert a text in a foreign language for translation into the tool and look at the translation to my native language. When you see the result, you often think: oh! Exactly!
Since I create my blogs in German and English, I can do it in both directions. Just great! 😀
Book a freelancer for a translation?
Of course, you can also book freelancers who will translate your texts in a highly professional way, for example, on platforms like Fiverr. But that can cost a lot of money, especially if it’s only a single post! The professional version of DeepL is much cheaper eventually. I pay €5.99 per month for the starter variant with annual billing.
I have currently completed a book about Chrome OS to about 90% and will publish it in German in due course. An English edition will follow later. I could also use DeepL to translate the whole document at once. That will be done in no time. For a certain level of quality, you can then book a freelancer to correct the entire thing again. That would be worth it! However, I would like my style of language to remain the same, even if it is not textbook-like. Maybe it is similar to you!? 🙂
So you can see that there is a lot to be said for using translation tools! And if they support you in achieving your goals, you will ultimately save time and money!
Conclusion
Translation tools provide excellent support to generate multilingual digital content efficiently.
How to optimize the translating texts with other tools is described elsewhere in this blog!
What do you think? Do you use other tools? 🙂
Back to the series “Everything you need to know about blogging on Chrome OS.”
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