A free online Spanish translator is available through Google. Google offers both individual sentence translation via their iGoogle widget and whole page translation at translate.google.com.  Like Google's, Bing's translator provides quite useable results.  The two systems differ in their methodology. One uses a grammatical parsing engine while the other relies more on contextual information gathered by comparing the Spanish and English versions of translated texts it finds online.

An online Spanish translator is useful for chat room conversation and casual social media use. However, one should exercise caution when trying to use it for professional purposes.  Online Spanish translation can get you part of the way toward a competent translation.  Achieving a truly professional translation requires studying the language for several years. Alternatively, having your work looked over by a native Spanish speaker will add professional polish.

Because the two major free Spanish translation engines use different methods, they will provide different results. Thus, one can analyze the differences between the results to improve the quality of any translated material intended for professional purposes. One validation trick is to feed the machine-translated sentence back into the translator while switching the direction of translation from English-Spanish to Spanish-English.  Any strange or mistaken results in this second translation should alert you to possible errors in the first translation, and you can make adjustments.

Combining these free translators with a basic knowledge of the structure of Latinate or Romance languages can provide a credible learning experience and yield decent translations.  Spanish, like other Romance languages, uses masculine and feminine gender for nouns, pronouns and adjectives.  Spanish verbs use conjugations to show mood (indicative, imperative or subjunctive), number (singular or plural), tense (present, past, future, conditional, and more), person (first, second or third) and voice (active or passive).  Any online Spanish-English translator will attempt to correctly render these finer points of grammar, but these are where they tend to fail most often.

Enjoy your online translation adventure. These fast, free translation tools open pathways for people to make new friends online and to cross virtual borders more easily than ever before.