In the New York Times Tuesday (March 9) there is a great article about Google Translate, one of Google’s best free services, and one that many students may find valuable.  Google has improved automatic “‘machine translation” so much that the result is often quite readable (if not exactly elegant).

You can use Google Translate to get workable versions of foreign language  journal articles, not just web content, that you find in your research in one of  our many library databases. Here is how:

Many databases have full text articles, either as PDF,  HTM or TXT files.  Just save the file and upload into Google Translate; choose the language conversion; and let Google go to work.  Here is a video of an example from Fuente Academica, a Spanish language index.

Of course, not all articles are online. UST Libraries photocopiers can also scan print journals articles, once you have logged on to a SharpDesk equipped library workstation.  Using the OCR feature convert the scan to a form Google can translate and upload or copy/paste.  It ain’t perfect but pretty darn good.  If you have any questions about this process, just Ask a Librarian!

Here is a brief video of how this is done using MicroSoft Word’s document imaging, slightly different than SharpDesk but you get the idea.