[Ger-Poland-Volhynia] writing in German, Russian

[Kenneth Browne]

I've noted that my list users make request for translation services in 
German, Russian, Polish, etc. I have found a tool that I believe may 
help some users, especially for German and Russian. It is a desktop 
"desklet" that translates between several languages: German, Greek, 
English, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Dutch, Portuguese, 
Russian, Chinese (simplified), and Chinese (traditional).

The "desklet" called Translator is part of a program called Avedesk (v. 
1.3). It's "donationware" which means according to the author:
> 0. DONATIONS
>
> AveDesk is not freeware, but DONATIONWARE. This means that you are not 
> free to use this application if you wish,
> but that you should donate a small amount of money to the AveDesk 
> authors if you like AveDesk and use it frequently.
> Donating is not enforced, it's rather a legal trick to make sure 
> no-one runs away with AveDesk for free :-).
It can be obtained here: http://avedesk.aqua-soft.org/download.html
The translator is just one of many desklets that you might like to use, 
but I haven't scratched the surface with most of them. I am running it 
with Window XP SP2 Home.

I've done a couple of test translations of English to Spanish and French 
(languages that I know) and found the results to be quite acceptable. 
Computer translations will never be perfect, but human translations 
aren't perfect either, so this may be a useful tool for those writing 
for archival records in German and Russian, as well as the other 
languages mentioned.

Here are the results of translating the following sentence from English 
to Russian and German:
> I am writing to request assistence in locating vital records of my 
> ancestors.
Russian: ? ???? ? assistence ??????? ? ??????? ???????????? ??????????
???? ???????????????.

German: Ich schreibe zum Antrag assistence, wenn ich lebenswichtige Sätze
meiner Vorfahren finde.

Those who know German and Russian are welcome to comment on these 
results. I know ZERO Russian and almost zero German, so I can't comment 
myself, but based on English-Spanish, and English-French, I thought it 
would be worth letting list users know about this tool.

-- 
Kenneth Browne researching: BROWN(E) LEIGHTON TAYLOR CLUFF LACHMANN 
RUSSELL MORSE PETTENGILL NOBLE SMALL WOLF MROCH LUEDTKE

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... I can trace my taglines back 8 generations
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