Are all translation sites equal? Shen (2010) compared the accuracy of various translation sites, and came up with the following results:

For this project, the authors judged 81 phrases from 51 signs translated into English, Korean and Chinese (2015) by 7 different translation sites: Infoseek, Google, Weblio, Yahoo, Nifty, Excite and Baidu (for Chinese). The relative success of the translations were rated by native speakers using a 3-level scale as follows:

As a result, it was found that different translation sites were more successful for different languages.

Shen (2010)

  1) Google is better for long passages
  2) Bing and Yahoo are better for short passages. 
  3) Yahoo better for East Asian Languages and Bing better for European languages

Author judged 81 phrases from 51 signs in English, Korean and Chinese (2015) 3=perfectly acceptable 2=relatively understandable 1=meaningless

(Yoneoka, Saito and Tomei 2015, Jacet)

These results show that there is no one site that can be used for translation into all languages. Consequently, the Higosign website features a multi-language translation function which is tailored to present the best sites for translation into each target language in this order. That is, baidu will be included when translating from Japanese to Chinese, and google will be first when translating from Japanese to Korean.