This is distant from birding, but it's so important that I felt it worth
forwarding. I tried it, and you can only get about a paragraph at a time
translated, but you could easily copy a document into it paragraph by
paragraph and get a reasonable translation. For most of us, it could be a
way to turn a foreign document into reasonably correct English quickly and
easily--if you had it entered into the computer, that is. Note it will
translate either pasted (or typed in) text or a web page if you type in the
URL. When I tried it with a web site containing several pages of text, I
found it translated only about half of it, then switched to English.
Interesting limitation on what seems like a miraculous program. It did
include all the graphics from the page, however.

Brave New World indeed!

>English translation:
>
> And if one not
>completely understands a contribution in another language, one can
>try the Babelfish of Alta Vista
>(http://babelfish.altavista.digital.com/cgi bin/translate). It is
>not bad, if one writes simply. It translates German, Spanish,
>Portuguese, Italian and French into English and back. This text was
>translated thereby.
>
>Auf Deutsch (Original text):
>
>Und wenn man einen Beitrag in einer anderen Sprache nicht ganz
>versteht, kann man den Babelfish von Altavista versuchen
>(http://babelfish.altavista.digital.com/cgi-bin/translate). Er ist
>nicht
>schlecht, wenn man einfach schreibt. Er ubersetzt deutsch,
>spanisch, portugiesisch, italienisch und franzosisch in englisch und
>zurueck. Dieser Text wurde damit ubersetzt.

Dennis Paulson, Director phone 253-756-3798
Slater Museum of Natural History fax 253-756-3352
University of Puget Sound e-mail dpaulson at ups.edu
Tacoma, WA 98416
http://www.ups.edu/biology/museum/museum.html