Have you ever been surfing the web, clicked on a link and the page came up in a foreign language you didn't understand? Have you encountered a word or phrase in Spanish, French or German that you wanted to quickly translate to English?
Although far from perfect, our friends at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), the creators of the AltaVista internet search engine have developed a handy tool. Just point your web browser to the site http://babelfish.altavista.com/cgi-bin/translate? and you will find a simple tool for exactly this purpose.
In the example below, I have typed in a simple phrase in English and requested a translation to French.
A click of the mouse and we have our translation in French.
A quick cut and paste to translate back to English and the results aren't too bad. I did say it was far from perfect.
And last, but not least, here's an example of an English to Italian translation of a web page by placing the web page address in the translation box.
This page last updated on Thursday, December 14, 2006
Have you ever been surfing the web, clicked on a link and the page came up in a foreign language you didn't understand? Have you encountered a word or phrase in Spanish, French or German that you wanted to quickly translate to English? 
