http://babelfish.altavista.com/translate.dyn

This web site allows the translation of English to and from French, German, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. The site enables you to type or paste in text in the language you have, hit the translate button and have the text translated into the language of your choice.

Similarly if there is a web site that is in a foreign language, you need only enter the complete URL and the translation service will return the web page with the text translated.

The translator works best when the text you wish to translate uses proper grammar. Slang, misspelled words, poorly placed punctuation, etc. can all cause a page to be translated incorrectly. Machine translation produces reasonable results in many cases. But you should not rely on it. AltaVista translates a maximum of 5k of text in an html page or chunk.

The translation software used is available from SYSTRAN(r) Personal for Windows 95 or NT (Version 1.0.2) and the cost is $US49 for any of the language pairs mentioned above. They also have language pairs for Japanese, Chinese and Russian. They also have varying levels of program enhancement, for personal users to professional users to client/server network level use. Their products range in cost from $US49, $US395, $US995,& $US3250.

A German example page is located at the following URL, it is a famous German poem, http://www.irossco/comedy/song52.htm You will note that the German word Frauen is not translated as intended. There is also a line of text that needs to be rearranged ... but overall it works.