The difference between Bing Translator and Google Translate in Joomla Translate

Joomla Translate has two online translation systems - Google Translate and Bing Translate (Microsoft Translator on Azure). In this article we will show you the difference between Bing Translate and Google Translate in Joomla Translate.

Both Bing Translate and Google Translate provide machine translation. But before we start comparing them, let's briefly look at human translation to make your Joomla multilingual website.

Human Translation vs Machine Translation

Website owners have to choose between human and machine translation for Joomla website. These two methods differ in three things - cost, time of producing and quality/accuracy of translation. It's not a secret that professional human translation is better in accuracy compared to the machine translation but requires significant financial investments and longer translation time.

Opposite to human translation, machine or automatic translating services obviously wins in translation cost as it can be even absolutely free! Also fast, almost instant time of translation is another big plus in favor of automatic translation. No matter how big your Joomla website is, you can expect the fastest time of translation. The only drawback in machine translation is accuracy of translating. Whereas professional human team of translators provide translation of meaning of the sentence, machine translation does only word to word translation, omitting idioms and terminology.

Must be said that automated systems becomes more and more comprehensive and accurate each year and quality of machine translations increases constantly. However auto-translated web pages should be post-edited by human. Joomla Translate provides an ability of editing automatically translated web pages, so by using Joomla Translate for Joomla websites, high-quality translation can be achieved at a minimum cost.

Bing Translator and Google Translate Comparison Table

Google Translate and Bing (Microsoft) Translator are the most famous translation services, that provides high quality machine translation. But when it comes to automatic translation in Joomla, it's better to know what is the difference between these translators in order to choose the one that suits the best to your needs.

Accuracy of translation

The accuracy of translation of Bing Translator and Google Translate is almost identical. According to The New York Times which runs the research how Google and Bing translates content compared to professional human translations, translations of Google and Bing are almost equally far from perfect professional human translations but concerning French and Spanish languages, Google Translate shows closer results to the human translations.

Amount of Languages

The first obvious difference between Google and Bing services of automatic translation is the amount of supported language. At the moment Google maintain 139 languages according to official source and this number is growing. Using Google Translate you can make automatic translations of your website on such languages:

• Afrikaans
• Albanian
• Amharic
• Arabic
• Armenian
• Assamese
• Aymara
• Azerbaijani
• Bambara
• Basque
• Belarusian
• Bengali
• Bhojpuri
• Bosnian
• Bulgarian
• Catalan
• Cebuano
• Chinese (Simplified)
• Chinese (Traditional)
• Corsican
• Croatian
• Czech
• Danish
• Dhivehi
• Dogri
• Dutch
• English
• Esperanto
• Estonian
• Ewe
• Filipino (Tagalog)
• Finnish
• French
• Frisian
• Galician
• Georgian
• German
• Greek
• Guarani
• Gujarati
• Haitian Creole
• Hausa
• Hawaiian
• Hebrew
• Hindi
• Hmong
• Hungarian
• Icelandic
• Igbo
• Ilocano
• Indonesian
• Irish
• Italian
• Japanese
• Javanese
• Kannada
• Kazakh
• Khmer
• Kinyarwanda
• Konkani
• Korean
• Krio
• Kurdish
• Kurdish (Sorani)
• Kyrgyz
• Lao
• Latin
• Latvian
• Lingala
• Lithuanian
• Luganda
• Luxembourgish
• Macedonian
• Maithili
• Malagasy
• Malay
• Malayalam
• Maltese
• Maori
• Marathi
• Meiteilon (Manipuri)
• Mizo
• Mongolian
• Myanmar (Burmese)
• Nepali
• Norwegian
• Nyanja (Chichewa)
• Odia (Oriya)
• Oromo
• Pashto
• Persian
• Polish
• Portuguese (Portugal, Brazil)
• Punjabi
• Quechua
• Romanian
• Russian
• Samoan
• Sanskrit
• Scots Gaelic
• Sepedi
• Serbian
• Sesotho
• Shona
• Sindhi
• Sinhala (Sinhalese)
• Slovak
• Slovenian
• Somali
• Spanish
• Sundanese
• Swahili
• Swedish
• Tajik
• Tamil
• Tatar
• Telugu
• Thai
• Tigrinya
• Tsonga
• Turkish
• Turkmen
• Twi (Akan)
• Ukrainian
• Urdu
• Uyghur
• Uzbek
• Vietnamese
• Welsh
• Xhosa
• Yiddish
• Yoruba
• Zulu

Bing Translator only supports 110 languages, and they add new languages periodically. Bing Translator provides translations for:

• Afrikaans
• Albanian
• Amharic
• Arabic
• Arabic (Levantine)
• Armenian
• Assamese
• Azerbaijani
• Bangla
• Bashkir
• Basque
• Bosnian
• Bulgarian
• Cantonese (Traditional)
• Catalan
• Chinese (Literary)
• Chinese Simplified
• Chinese Traditional
• Croatian
• Czech
• Danish
• Dari
• Divehi
• Dutch
• English
• Estonian
• Faroese
• Fijian
• Filipino
• Finnish
• French (Canada)
• Galician
• Georgian
• German
• Greek
• Gujarati
• Haitian Creole
• Hebrew
• Hindi
• Hmong Daw
• Hungarian
• Icelandic
• Indonesian
• Inuinnaqtun
• Inuktitut
• Inuktitut (Latin)
• Irish
• Italian
• Japanese
• Kannada
• Kazakh
• Khmer
• Klingon
• Klingon (plqaD)
• Korean
• Kurdish (Central)
• Kurdish (Northern)
• Kyrgyz
• Lao
• Latvian
• Lithuanian
• Macedonian
• Malagasy
• Malay
• Malayalam
• Maltese
• Māori
• Marathi
• Mongolian (Cyrillic)
• Mongolian (Traditional)
• Myanmar
• Nepali
• Norwegian
• Odia
• Pashto
• Persian
• Polish
• Portuguese (Brazil)
• Portuguese (Portugal)
• Punjabi
• Queretaro Otomi
• Romanian
• Russian
• Samoan
• Serbian (Cyrillic)
• Serbian (Latin)
• Slovak
• Slovenian
• Somali
• Spanish
• Swahili
• Swedish
• Tahitian
• Tamil
• Tatar
• Telugu
• Thai
• Tibetan
• Tigrinya
• Tongan
• Turkish
• Turkmen
• Ukrainian
• Upper Sorbian
• Urdu
• Uyghur
• Uzbek (Latin)
• Vietnamese
• Welsh
• Yucatec Maya
• Zulu

Pricing

If you want to test translator before purchasing, free version of automatic translation service may come in handy. But, in contrast to Microsoft Translator, Google Translate doesn't provide such possibility.

Microsoft Translator offers a free 2M-characters/month volume tier through Microsoft Azure Marketplace. There's no expiration date to subscribe to this monthly subscription tier. If you lack of free volume tier that provides Bing Translator you can consider upgrading your monthly subscription to higher monthly volume tiers when needed.

Pricing table of Microsoft Translator:

Google Translate API v2 is paid service, and it is calculated per million characters submitted to the service. Usage fees from Google Translate: $20 per 1M characters of text, where the charges are adjusted in proportion to the number of characters actually provided. For example, if you were to translate 500K characters, you would be billed $10.

Thus Bing Translator offers free translation quota up to 2 million characters per month and after this threshold the fee is $10 for 1M characters that is half as much as Google Translate API fee which is $20 for 1M characters.

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