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AS a native English- speaker, I always get nervous when I need to search content that's presented in a foreign language. In the past, I simply relied on the valueadded online services, which often add English-language abstracts or subject terms to non- English articles. That was usually enough to at least get a quick and dirty answer. I recently had a more challenging example of searching in other languages, and I was surprised at what I could find. The pain I experienced in dealing with free translation software, however, was not a surprise. But I get ahead of myself.
I received an assignment from a client to find out about the leading nonprofits in Brazil that focused on diabetes. It had to be done quickly, and she needed a fairly comprehensive profile of how each organization pursued its goals, whether they were more research- or activism- oriented, and what their key messages were. It was a fairly straightforward process to find the leading organizations in each country from English-language sources. But then I had to delve into Portuguese to get news coverage and to explore each organization's site.
My first approach was to paste each page's URL into Google Translate (http://translate.google.com) and Yahoo !'s Babel Fish (http://babelfish.yahoo.com) to...