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Google has been kind enough to provide a free high powered translation facility that anyone can use called Google Translate. It allows you to translate custom blocks of text that you type or paste into the translation page, or to provide it with a web page URL and it will fetch the page and display the translated page in your browser.
If you do a lot of translations from one particular language to another, you can make that your default choice from the Preferences page, saving you from having to repeatedly select the language pair from the language pair drop down box. If you don’t find the language you wish to translate in their selection box, you may want to contact Google and become a volunteer translator for the Google Translate project.
The translation is not done by humans but is a machine translation. This means that specialized software running on Google’s servers does the translation, instead of human translators. This means that translations done by Google Translate are good, but should not be relied upon for critical mission documents like legal papers, accounting related documents, medical documents or anything where a mistake could be costly due to you. However, it is one of the best we’ve seen and for trying to understand what a foreign body of text is saying, most of the time it will do a good job for you.
NOTE 2: You may need to install custom language fonts to view translated web pages or pages in their native language. For example, most English speaking computer users do not have the Japanese character set installed on their computer and would see question marks (“?”) wherever Japanese symbols are in the document. However, you can still translate from a language page that uses language specific characters and see translated text in the language of your choice.
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