Punch up: www.babelfish.altavista.com
Why it clicks: It’s a global economy out there. But taking advantage of international opportunities can be tough if your foreign-language skills have been in cold storage since the days of your high school prom.
The download: Babel Fish translates 12 languages into English (and vice versa) and has a feature to translate entire Web pages. Traditional Romance languages are covered, as are Chinese, Japanese, Dutch, German and Russian. Want to decipher the home page of a Korean company? It’s a snap with Babel Fish. Is that e-mail from Athens all Greek to you? Copy it into Babel Fish, and the program can make sense of it. The translations are not perfect, so you’ll want a qualified human translator for drafting important papers. But for a basic understanding of foreign documents and Web pages, Babel Fish is wunderbar.
