What is a difference between Language Cloud translation engine and SDL Machine Translation?

Good question! I would also like to know.

AMI SUZUKI Mats Linder

I moved this thread into a more appropriate community forum so we can try to answer this for you here.  Here's my take...

First of all note that "Language Cloud" is a platform and not a product.  "Trados Live" is the product you are probably using when you refer to the use of a translation engine.  This is an important concept because you can have many different things on this platform.  For example "Language Cloud" supports the use of:

• translation engines
• machine translation
• terminology
• etc.

A "translation engine" is a resource you can create in "Trados Live" that can be used in a translation project to provide:

• translation memories
• machine translation engines
• terminology providers
• language processing rules
• etc.

"SDL Machine Translation" is simply machine translation provided by SDL.  So this is just one resource that can be added to a "translation engine".

Within "Trados Live" the machine translation that can be provided currently comes from various sources but I fully expect this to increase over time in the same way Trados Studio has multiple machine translation providers available through the appstore:

• SDL Machine Translation (this is provided out of the box)
• Google
• Microsoft
• DeepL
• Amazon

The latter four are added to "Trados Live" through the "Add-ons" feature: