Related Resources • Genealogy Country Index • Genealogy Search Tips • Googling Genealogy Style

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If you go back far enough in your family tree, most of you probably have ancestors from countries where you do not speak/read the native language. Searching the Internet for clues on these ancestors can be a challenge as you spend precious time switching back and forth between your search results and a language translation program or Web site.

Enter my favorite search engine, Google. Using automatic machine translation technology, Google now gives English speakers one click access to a variety of non-English Web pages. To access this nifty feature just search as usual from Google's main page. Anytime your search has non-English results, there will be a "translate this link" page which takes you to a framed version of that page translated into English. The Web page is translated on the fly by Google's translation program. This feature is currently available for pages published in Italian, French, Spanish, German, and Portugese. Google is also working to enable automatic translation of English pages into other languages. This is already in effect for users of the French version of Google who now see a "translate this link" for Web pages in English, Spanish and German.

One of my favorite features of Google's automatic translation technology is that once you arrive on the framed, translated page, any links that you follow within that site are also automatically translated as you go. No more cutting and pasting text or URLs!

There are other such translation programs available on the net as well, including AltaVista's Babelfish and FreeTranslation.com. Each has their own features and translation capabilities so try them each out to find the right one for your needs. While machine translation isn't perfect, has lousy grammar,  and won't always translate slang or vernacular, it will provide a good approximation of the site's content - enough to open up the world of genealogy in languages other than your own.

Genealogical Translation Software & Services