Google, Alta Vista as well as many other websites offer free machine translations of foreign language websites.

There are still some practical applications even for these primitive language translators.  For example, in computer class students use them to translate news stories from foreign languages.  In this way students could do a current event story from a foreign newspaper for instance.   Imagine growing up being able to get the gist of what is being said on the front pages of the world.

 In many ways the internet has been making the world a smaller place.  To help break down language barriers there are many free online language translation websites out there.  The translations are done by computers that simply match words from different languages together.  It’s called a “machine translation.”  Unfortunately the results are not always that good.  In the boxes above I used http://translate.google.com/ to translate the English text into other languages.  Looks pretty impressive doesn’t it?  Below I have translated the foreign languages back to English using the same translator.  The results speak for themselves: