Translating English to Dutch using a computer prog? (1 Viewer)

Can anyone advise please.Earlier this year we met a Dutch couple who were stopping over in our village ,whils't on a cycling holiday of the UK.We have received a short thankyou note from them and a couple of postcards,but their English is very limited,and my Dutch is nil.so,please does anyone know of a computer prog which does translations.I could type a letter,and put it into the prog and hopefully at the touch of a button the whole letter could be taken from English to Dutch.
This may be calling all teachers,Steve,Tim,any ideas please.Or if any of our Dutch members do happen to read this,they may have a suggestion.They were a lovely couple.They mentioned in the local shop that they would like to watch Holland on the TV in the world cup,but there was no provision at the camp site,so I mentioned they were quite welcome to visit us and watch it on our tv.So we were all set up with bottles of wine etc,when this lovely couple arrived it transpired they had the dates wrong,and it was the following evening,when they would have cycled to Lancs.Anyway they were so embarrassed,but they stayed for the evening and chatted etc,they were a lovely couple.So I would love to send them a nice chatty letter,but need to find some translation,please.:stuck:

Christine - here are a couple of free translators:


http://babelfish.altavista.com/babelfish/tr?

http://www.freetranslation.com/

However, I am very wary of using them, because they can have very strange results. If you put a message in English into another language, then do a translation in reverse, you may well get some strange answers.

Elizabeth,thankyou,will give it a try.

Elizabeth,I have just printed a quick note and it was translated for me,so here's hoping!!.
Thankyou again.
I used the second one as it looked the most simple to use.It was certainly very quick.

The difficulty with the second translator is that it is literal. It doesn't understand the order that words go in the Dutch langauge. I know simple Dutch - I studied it at evening classes for 3 years before taking (and passing) an exam for external students from the Universities of The Hague and Leuven. I tried the second translator on a simple Dutch sentance and then translated it into English. The translation was very literal and didn't make a great deal of sense. The example was "I can understand written Dutch better than spoken Dutch", which both I and the translator program translated as "Ik kan geschreven nederlands beter dan gespreken begrijpen". I then used the program to translate that Dutch sentence into English and it turned out as "I can written understand dutch better than conversations."

I would offer to translate your letter for you, but my Dutch is very rusty. It's like anything you have to learn, whether learning a language or playing snooker, if you don't practice you fortget it. I couldn't pass any Dutch exam now, without a long refresher course.

Clive