Google Translate has increased its range with the recent addition of 11 new languages. Of particular note for Australian travellers are three widely-used languages from this corner of the world: Filipino, Indonesian and Vietnamese. While this kind of machine translation is still fairly rough, it can help get the gist of text when you're checking out (say) the site for an unfamiliar hotel.

Need a quick translation of a word into English? Type 'translate' followed by the word into Google's search box and it will now look the English translation for you straight away. While this doesn't offer the range of language pairs found in Google Translate, it's a quick fix for getting a translation from commonly encountered languages into English (currently, it covers French, Spanish, German, Russian, Chinses, Hindi, Italian, Korean and Portugese, though only into English from those languages).