Travel Tips

Online Translators

While the majority of Americans use the Internet to research travel destinations, you may be missing out on good information in another language. There are now a growing number of online translation services that could open up more direct sources of destination information even if you can only speak English.

Online-Translator.com allows you to enter web addresses and will translate the pages into English from French, Russian, German, Italian, and Spanish. Google is also now offering software that translates entire web pages, offering the major Romance languages as well as Russian, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, too. WorldLingo.com is free for phrases up to 150 words, but you’ll have to pay to translate more than that. Babylon.com offers free software that can translate documents online or off in 50 different languages.

And remember, no translation software is perfect, so always double-check any information you plan on using. And if you’re getting it from a site on the Internet that you are completely unfamiliar with (like sites in a language you don’t understand) triple-checking it might be in order.