Best Tools for Translating English to Simplified Chinese: Google Translate, Baidu, DeepL & AI Models Tested

Translating English content into Simplified Chinese requires accuracy that generic machine translation often fails to deliver. Jademond Digital tested eight translation solutions — Google Translate, Bing Translator, DeepL, Baidu Fanyi, ChatGPT (GPT-3.5 and GPT-4), and Baidu ERNIE bot — against a native Chinese speaker to determine which tools actually produce usable, natural-sounding Chinese.

The results reveal clear winners and surprising losers: Baidu's ERNIE bot and OpenAI's GPT-3.5 ranked near the top, while DeepL and Bing underperformed expectations. For quick internal translations, these tools work adequately. For serious enterprise website content or customer-facing materials targeting the Chinese market, the consensus is clear — machine translation alone is not enough. Transcreation with human expertise remains the only reliable approach for maintaining brand voice and cultural relevance in Chinese.

For our test, if the translation of English text to Chinese is just effective as Transcreation to Chinese, we tested different Translation SaaS offers against a human native Chinese speaker.

Google Translate, Bing Translator, Deeepl.com, and Baidu Fanyi are online tools, with a pretty straightforward user interface: you input your original text into a field on the left side, choose your target language, and receive the translated version on the right side.

For chatGPT we wanted a similar approach, so we prompted “Please translate the following text from English to Mandarin Chinese for Mainland China in Simplified Chinese: …”.

For ERNIE bot being very similar to chatGPT from the idea, we did the same: Only we translated the prompt first from English to Chinese. Although ERNIE bot is trained as a bilingual language model and understands both Chinese and English, we assumed that being a Chinese model, we maybe get better results if the prompt itself would be Chinese: Of course, the text that we wanted to be translated to Chinese had to be provided in English, otherwise, it wouldn’t have made sense.

OK, I do not want to let you wait and read too much (if you are interested in actually reading the translations, the comments, and detailed scores, head over to the translation vs. transcreation article). Here is the scoring board – here is the list sorted from best to worst (score):

It came as no surprise that the human Chinese native speaker wrote the best Chinese translation text, avoiding pitfalls with too-literal English translations.

However, I was surprised to see my favourite translation tool Deepl.com on the bottom of the list.

It wasn’t unexpected to find Baidu in second place – though not its Fanyi service, but rather the AI-driven ERNIE bot. This large language model is presently one of the biggest public models trained on a huge amount of Chinese data points.

Google Translate, beloved by many around the world, came in just behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT with its GPT-3.5 model – which did surprise me, as I’d have expected the GPT-4 model to do better than 3.5.

In short, the best Chinese translations come from a human native speaker, with AI models like Baidu’s ERNIE bot and Open AI’s GPT-3.5 close on their heels. Google Translate is not far behind either, and the last positions are taken by Bing Translator and Deepl.com.

Disclaimer: I will personally stick to my favorite tool Deepl.com for quick translations to Chinese. It is fast, convenient and my colleagues seem to understand quite well, which message I want to get across. But for serious content like for a big Enterprise website, I would not rely on translation at all, but choose transcreation instead.