Internet giants Google have been tirelessly working on their own version of an online translation application, imaginatively-titled Google Translate. As opposed to other translation services found online, Google's translation algorithm relies on more than mere dictionary cross-referencing to produce its translation. Still in beta stage, the service has been 'trained' on a corpus of United Nations texts in order for it to find word sequences and patterns that allow it to build a base of rules, treating language in a more human way than any machine translation has done in the past.

Google's pioneering tactics may cause rapid advancement in the milieu of machine translation, but for guaranteed accuracy human translation is still the norm. Machine translation may be free, but getting a quote for translation from an agency or translation service before you actually send the document can help you weigh up your options. English translations in particular are rarely too expensive, unless the text is a specialist text consisting of a lot of legal or medical language.

Machine translation can do a pretty good job with languages that share linguistic qualities: for example an online translation service for Italian could produce decent results if translated to or from Spanish, but at their current technological level is likely to offer some strange-sounding renditions in, say, Japanese. Languages from different roots rarely have similarities in word formation, and languages with words that inflect are often next to impossible for machines to translate accurately into a non-inflected language. When translating to a different writing system, it's far better to get a quote for Japanese translation from a human translation service.