Hi David - I remember a year or two ago someone needed a translation and it was promptly offered up by someone else who had gone to one of the web translation sites. It was a clumsy translation, to say the least. So when I read your note, I was skeptical. I went to Babblefish, and typed in some text from Ulrike Löhr's 400 Tricks book - the one we'd all love to have a translation to!
It wasn't a speedy proposition. The site does have handy buttons on the screen with which you can change letters with special characters - change "o" to "ö" for example, but that certainly slows you down when you're typing, and heaven knows the German language is peppered with special characters - all of which change the meaning of words. But when I got the translation - almost immediately - it was "reasonable" enough for me to understand the gist. I think Sally Barry is the one who observed how impoverished the German language is, so a single word is used for lots of different meanings. The free translation available on the website assumed the most common use of the word (I am guessing). Spitzen means lace (to us) but was translated "tip" by the system. But some words it just didn't know (annähen: sew on to, flechtspitzen: which I take to mean a braid), and in one case it gave me a nonsense sentence but I had been able to easily translate it with a dictionary. So the bottom line is that it might be helpful to feed something through the translator and then use a dictionary to clean up the translation that you get. It *might* be quicker that way... OR, if you're really eager to get a good translation, you can type in what you have, click a button, and not one but two human translators will give you a clean translation for merely $49.95! ; ) Clay Clay Blackwell Lynchburg, VA - To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line: unsubscribe lace [EMAIL PROTECTED] For help, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
