Yandex Translator: Pros, Cons, Limits, and Languages
Hello everyone, my name is Alex and I’m the Founder of Translation Cloud. We’ve just posted a video to YouTube on the pros, cons, limits, and languages of Yandex Translator.
Before watching this video or reading the rest of this post, please check out our last post, Machine Translation 2018: Google vs. Bing vs. Yandex, for a great overview of the state of machine translation in 2018!
An overview of Yandex Translator
Yandex Translator was launched in 2011 by Yandex, a Russian search engine. It’s not as advanced as Google Translate or Microsoft’s Bing Translator, but it does have some benefits that are unique only to their service. Yandex developed the translator because, as a search engine, the quality of their index is very important to them. So to prevent dishonest webmasters from trying to game the system and manipulate their rankings on the search engine, Yandex had to fight back by interpreting foreign language content in the same way they interpret Russian content—hence, they developed the machine translator. Yandex uses a statistical translation approach to provide fairly good translation results to end-users and webmasters who utilize their API.
Pros, cons, and crunching the numbers.
In terms of price, Yandex is squarely in the middle of the three translators. At $15 per 1 million characters translated, it’s cheaper than Google but more expensive than Bing.
It offers 95 languages, including some that are unique only to it, particularly a number of languages that are spoken regionally in Russia.
As far as limits go, Yandex offers the best value of all three services. They allow you to translate up to 1 million characters per day free of charge, and up to 10 million characters per month before their $15 per million character charge kicks in. This is great for small sites and developers who want to experiment with machine translation in their applications.
And finally, in terms of ease of use, at Translation Cloud we have used the machine translation APIs for Google, Bing, and Yandex for different projects and have had no preference as far as ease of development for any of the three. They all worked similarly and were easy to integrate as needed.
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