THE web speaks many lan guages. Yet a large majority of us remain limited to the English section. This constraint is, of course, a practical one.

After all, the Universal Translator remains an object of science fiction, at least up until the time of writing.

Our linguistic limitations have a two-fold disadvantage. Say, one needed information on the Netherlands. As a non-Dutch speaker you'd miss out on a significant compendium of freely available information. As a Dutch language site owner you'd lose a large audience that does not comprehend your language.

Translation services abound on the web, including free automated translation between languages, which can be used not just for Websites, but also to look up words and phrases in other languages. Webbased machine translation is not as accurate as "human" transla tion, but more often than not enough to get a basic understanding of the content.

Google Translate (translate.google.com) translates text and web pages between more than 50 languages, including Hindi and Urdu. It can attempt to auto-detect the language of the entered text, and also has transliteration and romanisation features for Devanagari, Arabic and other scripts. Other features include the `translated search' where you can search pages written in other languages in your preferred language. For example, if you're a Spanish speaker and want to look for travel information in Turkey, Google will do the dirty work for you and present you with search options in a language you can understand. Using the Google Toolbar will let you translate English words by just hovering on them. Further you can also drag a translation button to your browser's toolbar for a one-click translation of a selected portion of text to your preferred language.

Named after the little creature that could translate any language in Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Babel Fish (babelfish.yahoo.com) is a no-frills machine translation service for text as well as entire Web pages. Just paste your text or type in the URL to see the results in your preferred language.

Bing Translator (microsofttranslator.com) is Microsoft translator's webbased translation service for text and web pages, offering about 30 languages. No Indian languages are included, though. It has an autodetection of language feature, and the Microsoft Translator toolkit includes tools to transliterate romanised text to Arabic and Indic scripts. Other tools that users might want to check out include a translator for MS Office and a translator Accelerator for IE8.

Want to offer translation options to visitors to your own website? You can easily add the Google Translator or the Microsoft Translator to your own web pages.

Enter some basic information about your site, including the URL, main language and translation options required, as well as style options.

Then copy the code generated and paste it into your site.

You might also want to take a look at ConveyThis.com, a free translation button that provides up to 52 language options for your site via a dropdown list, and uses services like Bing, Google and Babel Fish for the final result.

On a final note, it must be remembered that automated translation does not provide a comprehensive, grammatical translation, but only attempts to give the user the basic content.

Some languages also have markedly different syntax and grammar, making it harder to get accurate results.

Payal Dhar is a freelance technology writer