Google Translate API does a great job, but it is a paid service. For those who don’t want to spend money on machine translation, or don’t want to go through the hassle of signing up and paying recurring fees, there is an alternative: the yandex API. It works with 30 languages, including Arabic, Azerbaijani, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Bosnian, Catalan, Czech, Danish, German, Greek, English, Spanish, Estonian, Finnish, French, Hebrew, Croatian, Hungarian, Armenian, Indonesian, Icelandic, Italian, Georgian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Macedonian, Malay, Maltese, Dutch, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Albanian, Serbian, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, Chinese.
It is an easy-to-use API: signing up and requesting an API key took me under 3 minutes. Just go to http://api.yandex.com/ and follow the instructions. It supports XML, JSON, and JSONP return string.
My English to Russian test translation, “Miru is a sweet girl”, returned
{
"code":200,
"lang":"en-ru",
"text":["Miru-сладкая девочка"]
}
Reference: http://api.yandex.com/translate/doc/dg/reference/translate.xml