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I have recently discovered a translation engine that actually translates the text of foreign web sites from various European languages to English. Really!

It's free for anyone to use. Not only will it translate web sites, it will translate German text that you enter. If you have a book or article written in German, you can enter the text and have the translator convert it to English.

I wrote a rather lengthy article on this tool which is part of the Alta Vista search engine. The article includes a demo as well as tips. If you are interested in this translator, read the article. It is posted at my site on the opening page under "how to translate German aquarium sites":

http://www.characin.com/

--Randy Carey

This response came in from Dean Hougen (now living in New England).

Thanks to Randy for pointing out Digital's Babelfish to MAS members. Like Randy, I have found this to be a valuable tool for reading aquarium and aquarium-related articles written in other languages. I've got two additional comments that MAS members may find useful.

One is for German translation of special characters. I'm sure the tip from Mike Wise works on some systems, although it doesn't on mine. (I'm using Netscape 4.04 under Red Hat Linux 4.2.) And, as Randy points out, you need a numeric keypad to do it. Also, it means remembering those numeric codes. Here is a better way:

There are conventions for writing German words that are supposed to contain special characters when you are limited only the standard English character set. For the character that looks like a Beta (?), for instance, the way to write it is 'ss'. (So "große" is written as "grosse".) For the vowels with umlauts over them, just use the regular vowel followed by an e. That is, for 'ä' use 'ae'.

The second comment that I would make is that Babelfish is also great if you like South or Central American fish, because it can translate Spanish or Portuguese to English as well. There are a growing number of sites by people living in South and Central America written in one of these languages, some about fish, some about geography or tourism, that are readily accessible in this way.