Hmm, perhaps what finally wrests me away from Babelfish? Google has announced that its translation service now offers single-word translations. Not like you’ve couldn’t do that before, but the new feature offers multiple word choices and even phrases.

You can do the word translations at http://translate.google.com/translate_dict?hl=en . Choose a word and then a language pair (there are ten available on the English version of the page; a few are in beta.) I choose richtig and the German-English translation.

Google translate gave me a total of fourteen different translation possibilities, from the expected “right” and “real” to other translations like proper, and even related German words. Beneath that there was a collection of phrases that use the word or similar words. Some of the phrases looked like what you might see in a language learning book (“sie ist nicht die Richtige für ihn”) while some of them looked very odd indeed (my favorite was “im Urlaub hab ich so richtig Zeit zum Schmökern”, which apparently means “on holiday I have plenty of time to bury myself in a book.” Must be nice!)

More languages would be nice, but I love the amount of information a one-word query gets back and I’m sure there’ll be a Firefox extension for this any second now…

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