Today I had to send an email to the French Consulate in Chicago. My French is pretty good, but not good enough to write a formal letter. So, I wrote the letter in English, then used http://translate.google.com to convert it into French.

Unfortunately, you really have to be a French speaker to tweak the output a bit. The automatically translated text had some errors, but mostly they were caused by English idioms that I used. Since I knew what text I wanted, I could see which input text was causing the errors.

But in the end, I got some pretty decent French text -- much easier for me than writing it in French in the first place. But, like I said, it helps to speak the target language.

5 top translation devices:

From Fox News

This looks cool and in comes in french and italian among other things:

My Word Coach

I do a lot of international travel: South America, Europe, and Asia mostly. Since I only speak English, it's really tough for me to get around -- especially in countries that use Japanese or Chinese characters.

What I've found that really works is to get a Translation Device -- this handy doodads will do text-to-speech, work as a dictionary, and some of the best ones even do voice recognition. When you can't afford to hire a personal translator during your travels, this is the way to go.