Who Translates For You?

I was curious who collectors - mostly of covers, many of which include letters and correspondence - use as translators.

I have purchased a few foreign items and am lucky enough to have had some people who could give me a basic translation of the letters. But I hate to always bother the same sources.

Does anyone use a service? Or is this just unheard of.
Or, what kind of reasonable fee would someone pay for a basic translation?

Google does all of my translating for me. Of course it can get stuck with words that aren't spelled correctly or that I can't quite make out how to spell. It also gives a very literal translation. It does give me a good basic understanding, but certainly not as good as using an actual translator.

I sell such letters on the bay one time I had a 1655 Jamaican letter written in old English. In that case I paid a translator to get the content translated. About 80 bucks. To pay for that kind of service it has to be something really good. Google translate is a amazing to. Then the next trick is to go to a genealogy site say rootschat and post a topic requesting translation help. Usually someone replies. Then you don't have to always bother the same person. It depends on origin of the letter to. Another case a Chinese letter single page but many characters was going to cost me $220, a bit steep. So professional fee translation services depends on: What country the letter is from & how many words in the letter. Lastly how readable is it & spelling errors. French letters in 1800s that I have seen are mostly merchant business content. I like to think I have had enough practice now to read the Scots & English letters earlier than 1900. Some Italian letters I have seen from 1680s/90s would be nice to know what they say, but its expensive to use a service. And to time consuming to do it yourself online. Enlarge the letters in a image software & type the foreign words as you see them, then try google translate

As a professional translator, I can quote you my rates for Chinese, Japanese, Indonesian and Malaysian to English: $A20 (plus GST to Australian residents) per hundred English words, and with a minimum charge as for 200 words. Of course, that's for nicely printed modern texts. Don't expect such generosity for old Japanese postcards written with the writing brush.

Google and other machine translation systems are OK - provided you understand their limitations. Don't lose sight of the old rule of computing: garbage in, garbage out. It applies, in spades, with machine translation.

If I can't translated it, most likely nobody in the local community will be able to translate it. I am fluent in Spanish which also makes it easy to understand most romance languages. I can also read greek phonetically which helps with greek greek-influenced languages. When it comes to east asian languages, the best I can do is maybe determine which language it is.

The American Philatelic Society has a translation service for its members which is inexpensive (the one time I used it for a two-page letter, the translator didn't even charge me)(so I made a donation to the APS instead). Also, 'Google Translate' is free and works very well.

Google translator depending on what characters are used in the text. I'll ask here about language then proceed. That's how I do it anyway..

I generally do my own translations. Because of traveling, I have phrasebooks and dictionaries for Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, Russian, Mandarin, and Swahili. Since I have a collection of older Persian stamps waiting for sorting at some time, I also have a guidebook to reprints and forgeries for most of those issues. Available from Persiphilia.

You can go to this site here http://www.free-ocr.com/ to get the text off of your scan of what you want translated, then run it through Google translate to get the translation of it. Sometimes Google translate may not be too accurate but you should at least get the gist of what is written.