Google Translate

Google Translate is a free automatic translator. It works without the intervention of human translators, using state-of-the-art technology instead.

http://translate.google.fr/

Google Translate currently supports translation between any of these 64 languages. You can either enter a text or the URL of the web page you want the translation.The translation in your chosen language will appear on the right.

Click "Détecter la langue" to automatically detect the language you are using.

As it is completely automatic, you should always use this translator with a critical mind and with discernment. 

To illustrate this point, just enter a text in your native language, translate it in any other language and the other way around, translate it back into the original language. You will then realize the limitation of that kind of tools, however very interesting as far as you keep in mind their limitations.

Depending on your purpose, you can use it in many ways. 

1) When you translate a single word, you may see a simple dictionary at the bottom indicating parts of speech and possible word variations.

For most language pairs, you'll also see a View Detailed Dictionary link which gives you sentences with your word put into context. 

Click on this icon This will display a more detailed Google Dictionary page with example sentences, images, and more.

Click this icon and the words will be spoken with the correct pronunciation in your chosen language

2) If you feel confident enough, you may as well write directly your text into the target language (let's say English here) and look at the translation in your mother tongue, it will show you instantly where you've made mistaken. Up to you to find the right wording.

Keep in mind that there no miracle as it is automatic and more subtle mistaken will not be taken into account!

  
For example:

That sentence exemplifies a very common mistake French speaking people do regularly. In French "sensible" means "sensitive" in English. In English "sensible" means "clever, wise...". Here, Google failed to tell them apart. Here the idea was to describe a very emotional, sensible woman who of course may be clever as well  ;=)

3) For more advanced users, you can switch to the Google Translator Toolkit which offers you numerous features to help you translate longer documents.

 

Here's what you can do with Google Translator Toolkit:

• Upload Word documents, OpenOffice, RTF, HTML, text, Wikipedia articles and knols.
• Use previous human translations and machine translation to 'pretranslate' your uploaded documents.
• Use our simple WYSIWYG editor to improve the pretranslation.
• Invite others (by email) to edit or view your translations.
• Edit documents online with whomever you choose.
• Download documents to your desktop in their native formats --- Word, OpenOffice, RTF or HTML.
• Publish your Wikipedia and knol translations back to Wikipedia or Knol.