Translate English to Spanish

Which Spanish you get

The model, Opus-MT English to Spanish, learned from millions of sentence pairs drawn from public translations: subtitles, official documents and websites, from Spain and from Latin America. Its Spanish is standard and mostly free of slang, but its words come from both sides of the Atlantic: in a test, "computer" became computadora, as in Latin America, while "laptop" became portátil, as in Spain. It cannot be told which country to write for, so check the words that differ.

Tú or usted

English "you" has no formal and informal forms, so the model picks one from context, and it tends toward the polite usted: "Please bring the signed contract and your laptop" came out as "Por favor, traiga el contrato firmado y su portátil" in a test. For a message to a friend, change it to tú by hand, or write the English more casually. The same goes for plural "you": ustedes is used in Latin America, vosotros in Spain.

Getting better results

• Write full sentences. The model translates sentence by sentence; fragments and headlines without verbs give stiffer Spanish.
• Keep sentences short. Very long sentences are cut at commas to fit the model, which can make the joins sound abrupt.
• Spell out abbreviations the first time ("as soon as possible", not "ASAP").
• Check names and numbers. Names are usually copied as they are; check dates, times and decimals against the way your reader writes them.

Going the other way? See Spanish to English, which is a separate download.