Translation Services

It's pretty obvious that although the English language is the predominant language on the web, there is much information of potential value in other languages. For example if you want to get useful hits from a foreign country, it would be worthwhile to use search words in the language of that country.

There are a number of utilities available for free to provide translations from one language to another. The number of languages on offer is limited, but it's a start. Here are a few I've found:

Babelfish
Remember Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? This will translate web pages from a selection of languages, whilst preserving the page formatting.   The result is useable if not necessarily syntactically accurate - I once retrieved a German article on the Shell/Esso Brent Spar which translated as the Brent "Save"!

Gist
Copernic.com and Alis Technologies have announced a new partnership to let Copernic integrate Gist-In-Time online language-comprehension solution into the Copernic2000 meta-search engine. This system has the advantage that it keeps on translating pages directly on your browser as you follow the links. It also has Chinese and Japanese in addition to the usual European selection.

L&H
Learnout & Hauspie have recently offered a translation service