ModernMT
ModernMT is an adaptive neural machine translation engine from Translated S.r.l., covering 200+ languages via a REST API and CAT plugins for Trados Studio, memoQ and MateCat. It learns from human corrections and sunsets at the end of 2026.
What is ModernMT?
ModernMT is an adaptive neural machine translation engine owned by Translated S.r.l., based at Via Indonesia 23, 00144 Rome, with a second office at Via Sommarive 18, 38123 Trento. The terms call it the ModernMT Software, and it reaches its users three ways: as a REST API, as a plugin for computer-assisted translation tools, and as a web interface at /translate.
Two things set it apart, and the site names both. The engine translates at the level of the whole document rather than sentence by sentence, a capability available on every service tier. And it learns in real time from human corrections, presented as the premium behaviour of the Human-In-The-Loop product, so that a translator's edits reshape the segments still to come. Against Google Translate or DeepL, the claimed difference is adaptation to the customer's own terminology; against Google AutoML or Microsoft Translator HUB, which also adapt to terminology, it is document-level context plus real-time learning.
Access is deliberately plural. The REST API sits on api.modernmt.com behind an MMT-ApiKey header, with endpoints for translation, language detection, the language list, sessions and batches, and official SDKs for Node.js, Python, Go, Java, .NET and PHP published under github.com/modernmt. Plugins cover RWS Trados Studio and memoQ, while MateCat ships the engine already. The public API returns 202 language codes; the site advertises 200 languages. Article 4.3 of the terms defines four packages: Adaptive, Human-in-the-loop, Individual Translator and Localization Teams. On pricing, the FAQ argues the technology is ten times more efficient than its predecessor and runs on otherwise idle infrastructure, which is how it claims rates comparable to Google Translate and DeepL.
The decisive fact is the timeline. A banner on every page states that ModernMT is evolving into Lara and will sunset by the end of 2026. New registrations are already closed, and existing API keys remain valid only until 31 December 2026. Lara is presented as the official successor rather than a rival, built on a specialised large language model, with translation memories and glossaries migrated by the team. The capabilities that look most attractive on the comparison table — document, image and audio translation, context and style-guide adaptation, an MCP server, a CLI — belong to Lara and are marked as not available for ModernMT.
What it does
- Translate text through a REST API across 202 language codes
- Adapt the output in real time to the customer's translation memories and corrections
- Translate with the context of the whole document rather than sentence by sentence
- Apply one-directional and multi-directional glossaries
- Detect the source language automatically
- Translate from inside Trados Studio, memoQ or MateCat through a plugin
- Send translation work in bulk through the batch endpoint
When to use ModernMT / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if ModernMT is the right fit.
When to use ModernMT
- Existing ModernMT customers who need translation continuity until the shutdown and a supported path onto Lara
- Companies embedding machine translation into proprietary or commercial software through the REST API
- Freelance professional translators working through a CAT plugin under the Individual Translator package, capped at 150,000 words per month
- Language service providers whose localisation teams need unlimited word volumes under the Localization Teams package
- Organisations holding translation memories and glossaries they want the engine to adapt to
When not to use ModernMT
- Consumers: the terms state the service is dedicated exclusively to companies and professionals
- Anyone under 18, excluded by article 3.1 of the terms
- Newcomers, since new registrations on ModernMT.com are now closed
- Teams needing document, image or audio translation, all marked as not available on ModernMT
- Users expecting adaptation to context, instructions or style guides, or profanity detection, none of which ModernMT offers
How to use ModernMT
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Note first that new registrations on ModernMT.com are closed: these steps describe an account opened before the sunset announcement
- Open the platform account, register a means of payment and activate the licence from the Control Panel (article 3.2 of the terms)
- For the API route, take the API key and send it in the MMT-ApiKey header against the https://api.modernmt.com base URL
- For the CAT route, install the plugin: Trados Studio from the RWS AppStore, memoQ through the plugin bundled with Translator Pro and memoQ Server; MateCat already embeds the engine
- For the browser route, open /translate, pick the source and target languages and paste up to 5,000 characters
- Import your translation memories from the platform so the engine adapts to your existing wording
- Upload glossaries as a two-column CSV whose first row carries the ISO 639-1 code of each column
- Follow the MateCat and Trados setup guides published as PDFs if the plugin configuration needs walking through
- Track consumption from the Dashboard and raise any dispute on the statement within the contractual window (article 5.4)
- To migrate, contact laratranslate.com/sales stating you are a ModernMT user: the team creates the Lara account and transfers memories and glossaries, then swap the ModernMT plugin for the Lara plugin and enter the new key
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Genuine customer adaptation: translation memories and human corrections feed the engine in real time
- Document-level context, which the site contrasts with generic sentence-by-sentence systems
- 202 language codes, verified against the public API rather than taken from marketing copy
- Learning is fenced in by article 4.7: nothing flows back to the shared neural models or to other customers
- Intellectual property of the translations stays with the customer, including after the contract ends (article 8.3)
- Slots into the existing CAT ecosystem — Trados Studio, memoQ, MateCat — without changing tools
- European publisher under Italian law, six official SDKs and detailed public API documentation open without an account
Cons
- Announced end of life: the tool shuts down at the end of 2026 and has no future as such
- New registrations are closed, so no account can be opened
- No public pricing: the pricing page now returns the homepage and no amount is consultable anywhere
- No free plan — the service is provided against payment (article 5.1)
- Text only: documents, images and audio are outside the scope
- Provided as is, with no accuracy warranty; review falls to the customer, and termination is the sole remedy for poor quality (article 6.1)
- No documented training opt-out, no published sub-processor list, no announced hosting location or security certification, and no social profile, about page or mobile app
Pricing & Plans
There is no free plan. Article 5.1 of the terms provides that the service is supplied against payment of the fee for the package purchased, including the cost of the licence. No lowest price point can be quoted, because no amount is published: the pricing page now returns the homepage byte for byte and new registrations are closed, so the terms describe the structure without ever stating a figure. Article 5.2 sets two regimes — an automatic fixed monthly fee for the Individual Translator package, and consumption-based billing on the number of characters submitted during the month for every other package. Fees are stated net of VAT where applicable. Under article 5.5, invoices are denominated in US dollars while payment is made in euros at the official exchange rate in force, charged automatically to the registered means of payment; the invoice follows within seven days of receipt of payment for the fixed fee, or by the seventh day of the following month for consumption billing. Article 5.3 mentions a trial period only conditionally, and none is offered. Customers moving to Lara are told the team will assess whether keeping ModernMT-style volume pricing or moving to a Lara subscription with a volume usage fee is preferable.
- Adaptive — for companies and professionals
- includes automatic adjustment on the corrections and translation memories supplied by the user (article 4.3.a)
- Human-in-the-loop (HITL) — the same functions as Adaptive
- plus style-guide support and real-time optimisation of the translations thanks to corrections made by professional translators (article 4.3.b)
- Individual Translator — for the self-employed professional translator
- used through a CAT plugin
- with real-time optimisation from the translator's own corrections
- personal albeit professional use
- business exploitation excluded
- capped at 150
- 000 words per month and billed as a fixed monthly fee
- Localization Teams — for language service providers
- used through a CAT plugin with real-time optimisation
- intended for business exploitation
- with no limit on words or characters
- their economic conditions were set out in a Product Sheet on the site that is no longer reachable
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how ModernMT handles your data.
GDPR overview
GDPR implementation is concrete rather than merely claimed. The privacy policy is issued under article 13 of Regulation (EU) 2016/679 by Translated s.r.l., Rome, VAT IT07173521001, and states that processing follows the Regulation, Italian law and the prescriptions of the Garante. Rights under articles 15 to 23 — access, portability in a structured, machine-readable format, rectification, erasure, restriction and withdrawal of consent — are exercised by writing to info@modernmt.com, and a complaint may be lodged with the supervisory authority, in Italy the Garante per la protezione dei dati personali. Processors are appointed under article 28, but the list is disclosed only on written request, not published. A data processing agreement is referenced in article 13.3 of the terms without being published or linked. Established in Italy, the publisher needs no article 27 representative. The policy is dated December 2023.
Who owns the data?
Ownership is split. Article 8.3 of the terms leaves the intellectual property of the automatic translations with the customer, who keeps full and exclusive ownership including after the contract ends. ModernMT owns the service itself: the software, the website and the platform (article 8.1). Article 8.4 has the customer authorise ModernMT to copy, reproduce, process and analyse the uploaded documents and the corrections made to the machine output, for learning purposes connected with providing the service; article 8.5 has the customer warrant its right to upload them. For personal data inside documents ModernMT acts as processor, and as controller for account data (articles 13.1 and 13.3).
Reuse rights
The customer may reuse its own translations without asking anyone: article 8.3 grants full and exclusive ownership of the machine output, with no permission to request and no restriction surviving termination. In the other direction, article 8.4 lets ModernMT analyse uploaded documents and corrections for machine learning, and article 4.7 fences that learning in. What the engine learns from a customer's corrections and already-translated documents is used only to improve that same customer's later translations, and is not fed into the shared neural models or used for the benefit of other customers. Beyond the documents themselves, the privacy policy lists the data ModernMT handles: identity and contact details, tax data such as the tax code and VAT number, and service usage data, processed to perform the contract and meet accounting and tax obligations. Marketing, and the disclosure of data to third parties for their own marketing, each require separate consent, with soft spam invoked under article 130 of Italian legislative decree 196/2003. Payments run through third-party systems such as Stripe, acting as independent controllers. No mechanism for opting out of the learning is documented anywhere on the site.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
The site says nothing about where data is hosted. Neither the privacy policy nor the terms names a hosting country, a region, a cloud provider or a data-centre location, and targeted searches of the archived pages for AWS, hosted in, data centre, servers located, SOC 2 and ISO 27001 returned nothing relevant. What is stated is jurisdiction rather than geography: the publisher, Translated s.r.l., is established in Rome; processing is declared to comply with the Regulation, Italian law and the prescriptions of the Garante; and Italian law governs the contract. Section 5 of the privacy policy limits disclosure to processors appointed under article 28 and to possible assignees of the contract, adding that data shall not be disclosed in any way to any other unspecified parties. No transfer outside the EU is described and no standard contractual clauses are mentioned. No security certification is displayed. Technical observations made during collection — the A record resolving to 76.76.21.21 on Amazon AS16509 with a US geolocation, and setup guides served from a public us-east-1 S3 bucket — describe the website's own infrastructure, not a declared hosting policy for customer data, and should not be read as one.
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting ModernMT.
- A hard deadline: the shutdown lands at the end of 2026 and API keys stop working on 31 December 2026, so any integration started now is disposable by construction
- Registrations are closed, so no pilot can be opened and a stalled migration has no fallback on ModernMT itself
- No public price. Amounts go through the sales team, which removes the ability to budget or compare before committing
- Article 8.4 has the customer authorise automated analysis of uploaded documents for learning purposes. Article 4.7 confines that learning to the customer, but sensitive material still leaves your perimeter, so read both before uploading client files
- No documented way to opt out of training, no published sub-processor list — it is disclosed only on written request — no announced hosting location and no displayed security certification
- The service is supplied as is with no accuracy warranty, and termination is the only remedy for poor quality. Fluent-sounding output invites the habit of skipping review, which is exactly how a wrong translation ships
- Billing asymmetry: invoices in US dollars, payment in euros at the official rate, with claims on the consumption statement time-barred after five days (article 5.4)
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Difficulty depends on the route. The web interface at /translate needs no setup at all. A CAT plugin is a light install — from the RWS AppStore for Trados Studio, or the memoQ store — followed by pasting the key, with PDF setup guides provided; MateCat already embeds the engine. The API route is developer work: an MMT-ApiKey header, public documentation and six official SDKs, plus glossaries supplied as a two-column CSV whose header row carries each column's ISO 639-1 code. The real obstacle today is administrative rather than technical: no new account can be opened.
Deployment
Integrations
Supported languages
Behind ModernMT
Fundraising
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Alternatives
Tools that compete with or complement ModernMT.
Frequently asked questions
Is ModernMT shutting down?
Can I still sign up for ModernMT?
Do I have to change my API key straight away?
Will I lose my translation memories?
How do I update the Trados or memoQ plugin?
How many languages does ModernMT support?
What sets ModernMT apart from Google Translate or DeepL?
Do my corrections benefit other customers?
Is the service open to private individuals?
How do I terminate?
Should you pick ModernMT?
ModernMT solved a real problem, and solved it well. Its adaptation technology is documented rather than merely asserted: the engine ingests your translation memories and corrections, translates with the context of the whole document, and article 4.7 of the terms writes the fencing into the contract — what it learns from you serves only you, and never reaches the shared neural models or another customer. Article 8.3 leaves the intellectual property of the output entirely with you, contract or no contract. For a team already working inside Trados Studio, memoQ or MateCat, that combination was unusually clean.
The verdict today has to start somewhere else. ModernMT is a product in run-off. The banner on every page announces the sunset at the end of 2026, registrations are already closed, API keys expire on 31 December 2026, and the pricing page has quietly stopped existing — a request to /pricing returns the homepage. There is no free plan and no published amount left to evaluate.
So the tool splits its audience in two. If you are an existing customer, ModernMT remains usable and the sensible move is the migration the publisher is offering: the Lara team creates the account and carries over memories and glossaries, and swapping the CAT plugin is announced as a ten-minute job. Nothing forces a rushed exit, but the end date is fixed and it is not moving.
If you are arriving now, there is nothing here to evaluate. You cannot open an account, and the capabilities on the comparison table that look most appealing — document, image and audio translation, style-guide adaptation — are Lara's, not ModernMT's. Read this page as the record of a good engine, and go straight to its successor.
- Choosing a selection results in a full page refresh.
- Opens in a new window.