Matecat's default machine translation engine

What is Matecat's default machine translation engine?

Matecat's default machine translation is ModernMT, a machine translation engine developed by Translated, Matecat's parent company.
ModernMT is an adaptive machine translation engine, which supports 200 languages and has been voted the best machine translation on the market multiple times.

Why ModernMT?

Traditional machine translation engines are static: their output does not get better over time, so you have to keep correcting the same mistakes over and over and always have to adapt their style and terminology to those required for the translation at hand.

ModernMT is adaptive: it learns from your past translations, tailoring itself to the style and terminology required for a specific job and avoiding repeated errors. It's like having a smart assistant that gets better at helping you as you go, saving you tons of time. When you need to translate something, it checks previous translations to find similar sentences and then adjusts the result based on your past work. What’s more, it learns from your translations on the fly and takes into account the context of the whole document to make sure that it uses the correct style and terminology. Every time you make changes to one of its suggestions, ModernMT gets better at providing you with accurate translations for upcoming segments, saving you precious time.

Watch the short video below to learn more about how adaptive MT works:

How do I use it?

ModernMT's adaptive machine translation is already integrated into Matecat and selected as the default machine translation engine. It appears as "ModernMT lite" in the "Machine Translation" tab.

Why is it called 'ModernMT Lite'?

The engine is called "ModernMT Lite" because the version of ModernMT used as Matecat's default machine translation gives users access to adaptivity, ModernMT's core feature.
However, ModernMT offers advanced features that can be used by purchasing a subscription here.

Below, you can find a comparison of the differences between ModernMT Lite and the full version available to subscribers.

Feature	ModernMT Lite	ModernMT Full
Adaptive pre-translation	❌ Only gives access to adaptive suggestions while editing a specific segment	✅ Also gives access to adaptive suggestions during the pre-translation phase, unlocking the possibility to obtain the adaptive machine translation of whole documents
Dedicated MT glossary	❌ Does not give access to MT glossaries	✅ Gives access to the creation, management and usage of MT glossaries, which ensure even greater levels of consistency in terminology
Optimized TM usage	❌ Gives access to suggestions adapted only on the TMs linked to a specific job	✅ Gives access to suggestions adapted based on all the translation memories linked to the user's account and weighted by relevance for the current job
Dedicated ModernMT support team	❌ Does not give access to ModernMT’s support team	✅ Gives access to ModernMT’s dedicated support team for quick problem resolution and technical information

More details about Matecat's ModernMT plugin are available here.

What happens if my language combination is not supported by ModernMT?

For language combinations not supported by ModernMT, Matecat falls back on the Google Translate API. If the language combination is not supported by Google either, machine translation will not be available for projects created in that combination.