Hi Jennifer,

SDL Language Cloud and Google Translate will both allow you to retrieve machine translations of your source content. The difference is that they are from different companies and use different engines so the output from each one will most likely be different. I don't have a great deal of experience with Google Translate but I do know that they stopped offering this as a free service and now you have to pay to get translations. To do this you must have an account and an API key and I suspect that is where you are running into trouble.

For SDL Language Cloud you can get access to a Free subscription using your SDL Account credentials if you also have an SDL Trados Studio license on the account. There's a video here about setting up and using it: www.youtube.com/watch

If you have problems using SDL Language Cloud from within SDL Trados Studio then please contact our support team who should be able to get you going. If you're having trouble setting up your support contract then perhaps try here for an answer: languagecloudsdl.uservoice.com/

I hope that helps to answer your question and goes some way to getting you up and running.

David