Is there a better alternative to Google Translate?

There's a difference between (1) online-only translation systems and (2) installable software. Online systems cannot be trained on your own data, so they might not work on your domain. There is also a problem with privacy, if you have to translate sensitive material. Installable software doesn't have these problems, but you have to first install and often train it yourself.

For online-only translations, Google Translate is the state of the art. Microsoft also has one (Bing translate) that's pretty good. But their translation team seems much smaller than Google's.

For downloadable software packages, state of the art are Joshua, Cedec and Moses. Which one of these is better depends on your particular domain, the language pairs you need, etc. Joshua and Cedec use very similar techniques, based on Hiero (PDF), which itself is not available publicly, with their own improvements here and there. Moses uses a more traditional model (phrase-based), but has recently added an option to translate using a Hiero-style model as well.

Note: The Google and Microsoft systems will probably never be available as free downloadable software. But vice versa, it would be cool if someone provided online access to installed and properly trained versions of Joshua, Cedec and Moses. They are all free software, so someone just has to set it up, although it would be best if the system authors themselves did it, since all of these systems keep changing and improving, so it would be hard to keep them up-to-date on the online site.

Objective evaluation of MT systems is inherently tough but considering standard tests like BLEU google's is state of the art. A few others one which are close are JOSHUA by clsp lab at hopkins and language weaver.

Yes there are many when it comes to Indian Languages. There are many MT systems in India which are better at some kind of sentences compared to the Google translate. You may try them here MaTra by CDAC Mumbai and Shakti by IIIT-H. And there are couple of other systems by IITs [IITB and IIITK ].

You can try our free translation API. It translates from and into more than 160 languages. No registration is needed. The API is absolutely free to use: Translation API

Yahoo uses BabelFish and MS also has a good translation tool. Some recent research indicates that their quality is comparable, but that human readers (especially once you removed brand) liked the others better in certain circumstances: shorter sentences faired better with Babelfish / MS, Babelfish did better with East Asian languages (more are listed in the article).

Since google killed there epic free translation api I've done something epic I've made it free go here for more info http://raizen.tk/forums/index.php?/topic/5-translate-api/ on how to use it