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Foreign languages
Babelfish
Over 50% of web users aren't native English speakers. So here's an excellent site giving usable translations of everyday language, with only the occasional glaring error. Even retranslating a text back into the original language gives something comprehensible (in this case, "An excellent site which gives translations usable of daily language, with only the occasional bright error"). But beware: German sentence structure, highfalutin words or intricate grammar will set Babel babbling.Chinese text initiative
A University of Virginia project, the CTI aims to make Chinese literature more widely available online. The site is still under construction but 300 poems from the Tang period (618-907), considered the golden age of Chinese poetry, are already on offer, along with a number of other full texts, in English translation or in Chinese if you have the appropriate software. Foreign Language Resources
An exhaustive selection of links for language, literature and politics abroad: particularly good on French and Spanish. Gallica
An excellent collection of classic French literature provided by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, with more than 2 million pages online. With introductory texts (in French) on the humanities in France, picture archives and a small archive of sound recordings - including such gems as Apollinaire reading his poems in 1913 - this is a good starting point for French literature. Electronic Text Collections in Western European Literature
Links to a nice collection of literature and historical/social science etexts in not only French, German etc, but also Catalan, Old Norse and Provencal. I Love Languages
Cutesy title, but impressive site: more than 2,000 individually reviewed links to language resources on the net. The 'top sites yesterday' section is illuminating ('How to Wow! in Japanese'). Language guesser
A good place to start if you're really confused, this page will guess the language of any text. With a range of 31 (mostly European) languages, and impressive results even for small fragments, dialect, slang and ancient texts, this site will let you know what you're dealing with in no time. Voice Of The Shuttle
Comprehensive collection of links to web resources on literature in languages other than English. Your dictionary
The definitive starting point for web dictionaries, this site provides an impressive array of over 1,000 dictionaries in 190 different languages. There are multilingual dictionaries, specialist dictionaries and thesauri, language guessers and online grammars, and the opportunity to keep your chosen dictionaries open on your desktop.
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