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Various people have sent in questions about translation services on the web: where to find them; what languages they cater for; are they any good etc

You should not treat anything found on sites that offer translation services as gospel. They may be okay as a rough guide to what you are looking for, but using them to write your French essay or translating electrical appliance instructions from German is inadvisable.

However, the question was asked, so I will try to answer it. Babelfish http:// babelfish.altavista.com/ translate.dyn is a free service provide by the AltaVista search engine that translates words, phrases, and entire websites to or from English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese or Italian.

To test it I put the question paragraph above into the site and had it translated to French, then put that in and had it translated back to English. It came back: The various people introduced the questions about the translation services about the Web: where to find them; which languages they cover; are they any good etc . . . Not bad. Doing the same trick with Spanish and back gives you Varia people have sent in questions on services of translation in the Web: where to find it; what languages supply; they are any good etc . . . Not quite as good. Going from English to German to French to Portuguese and then back to English again leads to the esoteric: Some peoples emitted in the questions on jobs of translation to the Web: where if he finds; the languages assure it for lesquel; they are each etc. good . . . which is confusing, to say the least.

If you keep in mind the old saying "It loses a lot in translation" you might find such web-based services useful. Other than that, it can also be a lot of fun to see how distorted a message can become with a few translations, a sort of techno-generation version of Chinese whispers. If anyone knows of a more reliable web translator, let me know.