Babelfish

Babelfish rocks.

Mostly.

I'm trying to put together a master sheet of all the terms of all the deals my company has. Unfortunately, several of our clients are foreign. Including some in Mexico. Which means that all the paperwork was filed for Mexican courts and such, and so it is all in Spanish.

I do not speak Spanish.

So I am putting 50-page documents one page at a time into Babelfish, and trying to wade through the results to extract the relevant information.

I could not do this without Babelfish, which is why it rocks.

But it is not really intended to translate legal documents about tricky financial transactions (the English documents are hard enough to read). And Babelfish translates things fairly literally, while Spanish does not always place clauses and the like in the same places English does. So the resulting output is dense legalese with patches of untranslated words, translations that don't map to the technical terms I'm looking for, and an odd, counterintuitive phrasing.

Hence the incompleteness of Babelfish's rockage.

And the existence of my growing headache.