I received the following letter from a reader of Genealogical Computing and promised the author that I would track down this information for her. Following the letter are the results of my search.
Dear GC,
Could you recommend a program by which one could translate long documents from German to English? I do not want to learn German or try to look up each word in a dictionary, but be able to put whole documents or paragraphs into a single tool and have them translated. I have a number of documents in German. It seems it will be very costly to have them translated. I thought a program might be worthwhile.
Thanks for your time,
Vicky Bishop
Vicky, the first place I looked was on the Internet. The site FreeTranslation.com allows you to translate from English to Spanish, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, and Portuguese. It also allows you to translate from Spanish, French, and German to English. My language experience is all French, so I tested the translation from French to English with a phrase that my father used on my mother when they were courting. The phrase is, “Je vous aime; je vous adore; que voulez-vous plus encore.” I’ve always thought the phrase translated as, “I love you; I adore you; I want you forever more.” However, the phrase translated on this Web site as, “I like you; I worship you; that do you want more again.” When I typed in what I thought the phrase meant in English, the French translation came back as, “Je vous aime; je vous adore; je vous veux à jamais plus.”
It appears that you can type whole letters or documents into the input space and you’ll get back a machine-generated translation, which may be all you need to get the gist of a letter from an ancestor. You could also use the free translations to translate phrases for letters you are sending to Spain, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, or Portugal to request documents.
If you’re looking for something more in-depth and translated by a real person, try the not-for-free site at PlusTranslation.com. The site indicates that you can receive instant quotes on the material you need translated, and the cost starts at about 19 cents per word. The service is available for more than fifty different languages.
A few other sites that also offer free translations—both text and Web sites—are listed below:
For more options, such as language dictionaries and paid translations services, check Rivendell International Corporation or Translate-free.com.
Vicky asked about translation software. I haven’t tested any such software, but I’ve done some snooping around the Internet and have found the following products, which I’m offering untested.
Easy Lingo, by QuickWiz Technologies Corporation
The Web site for the product says the program is “a real-time interactive dictionary that lets you translate between English and any one of Dutch, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Hebrew.” This program doesn’t appear to actually translate the document, but you hold your cursor over a word and it will translate that word into the available languages in a “tool-tip balloon.” The program retails for $29.95.
Dictionary 2000 v5.1, by Stepanyuk Oleg (shareware)
This software is described as “a dynamic foreign language vocabulary program that works with thirteen languages: English, French, German, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swahili, Polish, Serbian, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, and Norwegian.” The program received a three-star rating from ZDNet and is free to download, but costs $20 if you want to keep using it.
Universal Translator 2000, by Language Force
According to the product description “Universal Translator 2000 now has full, transparent Web page translation, in addition to e-mail and documents.” The program can translate forty different languages and retails for $129.
There are most likely other candidates for your translating needs out there. These are just a few options to consider, but as with anything else, you should research the capabilities of the language translators to make sure they can fulfill your needs.
Elizabeth Kelley Kerstens, CGRS, is the managing editor of Genealogical Computing, editor of the Board for Certification of Genealogists’ newsletter OnBoard, the creator of Clooz—the electronic filing cabinet for genealogical records, and a frequent contributor to Ancestry Magazine. She can be reached via e-mail at liz@ancestordetective.com or gceditor@ancestry.com.
GC Extra
