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Lifehacker report that "Google has quietly added another new feature to its basic search box–single-word translations between English and nine different languages, including French, Italian, and Spanish." Undoubtedly a useful tool.
Generally, I use Google to spellcheck in English (at which I suck) anyway. By typing the approximation into Google, it comes back with "Did you mean …"
When it comes to single word (or just a phrase) translations, Firefox users have a couple of other, even handier tools available to them. The first, using Google’s language tools, is the gTranslate add-on, with which you can translate any text in a webpage just by selecting and right-clicking over it. This is quicker than going to Google and even faster than typing "translate" followed by the word you want to convert to English, into your search bar.
Should it fail and, unfortunately it does, frequently, fail to translate the more "difficult" words, Wikipedia can often be used to come up with the answer.
The long way round to do this would be to go to the Wikipedia site of the language of the word that you want to translate from, search for the term, then look down the left-hand column, for where it says "English".
Provided there is an English version, this is a particularly good way of finding translations for words and terms that are not straightforward and that would be hard to find or may not have shown up in the standard dictionary.
There are less steps to this process if you have your Google preferences set to search for pages written in any language and have the Firefox addon, Googlepedia, which shows you the relevant Wikipedia article along with your search results automatically. Beats leafing through dead-tree dictionaries.
Sponzurz
