Want to join the polyglot set but don't have the time for foreign language immersion, world travel, or academic courses? One Minute Languages offers basic instructions in a dozen languages for English speakers including German, Russian and Japanese that will help get you started. The short lessons are released weekly as a podcast you can subscribe to via iTunes, or you can just visit the site to play back archived tips in your browser. If you want the complete package for a particular language, a full download of all the lessons is only £3.50. The Radio Lingua Network, which produces the series, also offers Coffee Break Spanish and Coffee Break French — for those of you with more than a minute to spare as you sip your java. Extend your lessons with ten new vocabulary items a day and the interactive language teaching tools at Mango.

Google Reader and Google Translate have teamed up to bring a neat new feature — you can choose to have feeds in Google Reader machine-translated on the fly. For instance, if your Google Reader language is set to English under Settings > Preferences, a subscription to a blog in Japanese will appear (more or less) in English. It doesn't seem to have been rolled out for everybody quite yet, as some of us at Lifehacker could access the option on the Feed settings drop-down menu and some couldn't. A neat trick, but the automated translations still have a tendency to be unintentionally hilarious. Users of the new Reader feature are promised that as Translate gets better, so will the translations of the feeds.

Windows only: Ever use an online translation service and wonder if you can get more accurate results elsewhere? Translate.Net, a free Windows translation aggregator, knows just how you feel. The desktop app puts your words or phrases through 17 different language translation engines and dictionaries, letting you scroll through and compare results. A total of 25 languages are supported, but the program remembers your recent translation directions to save you the time of scrolling to find the right pairing. A great tool for language learning, or just seeing how different one phrase can be interpreted. Translate.Net is a free download for Windows systems only, requires .NET Framework 2.0

Read More »

Ever wonder how some people can get a grounding in a foreign language in the two weeks before they travel, but your own long-term efforts haven't paid off? Part of it is natural ability, but another aspect is the enforced budgeting of a crash course. Learn it lists, a free language-learning web application, gives you just 10 words each day to learn the translations of. Granted, speaking and writing a language is more than just knowing vocabulary, but making a small but committed effort every day to building your skills will likely be far more helpful than that two-language dictionary gathering dust on your bookshelf. The site requires a free registration to start using, supports 15 languages (at the moment) and can have its widgets embedded in an iGoogle page.

Read More »

The How-To Geek weblog highlights a translation feature new to Microsoft Word 2007 that—obviously enough—translates highlighted text directly in Word. To use it, highlight your to-be-translated text, head your the Review ribbon, and click the Translate button. Word can translate either the entire document or just your selection, and it does it through an online translation service. The number of available languages is impressive, so you should be able to translate virtually anything you need. If browser-based translation is more your speed, check out the best translation services on the net.

Read More »

Google has integrated translation tools into its Google Talk and GChat interfaces through the use of chat bots. To have a line translated from English to French, for instance, invite en2fr@bot.talk.google.com to chat, then simply chat the line you want to see translated. The bots use Google Translate as their back end, which, as one Blogoscoped commenter notes, has quite a few languages in rough beta, so this tool should mainly be used for casual or on-point word or line translations. For more translation tools and tips, try Wendy's guide to translation sites.

An undocumented Gmail search operator, language: (or simply lang:), finds messages by the language they're written in. Give it a try in your inbox: lang:Portuguese and lang:Arabic both turn up several messages in the Lifehacker tips box. Sadly -lang:English doesn't seem to work, which would be perfect to create a filter for all messages not in English; but you can create filters to snag messages in particular languages you don't speak, for instance.

The web makes it possible to search for documents written in every conceivable language, but what if you don't actually know the language you find that special somethin' written in? No worries—there are plenty of online translation services that can give you anything from just a good idea to a complete translation of what you're looking at.

Read More »