Universal Translator, from LanguageForce Inc., claims to translate between English and Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Esperanto, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italia, Indonesian, Latin, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukranian, and Vietnamese. A "first draft tool," or for reading email or web pages, or useful as a spelling checker. Just $99, for Windows 95. , 888-837-8887. [, comp.edu.languages.natural, 25Aug97.] (The company also makes a $197 Chinese Dragon Writer, for "Level II" or "professional" translation and language learning, and a collection of $39 native-speaker CDs for instruction in Asian and European languages (and ASL).)

The Uni-verse chat system does real-time translation in French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and English. Free Windows 95/NT trial software, or Java-based service. . [Bennett Blaustein , net-hap, 10Jul97.]

Dictionaries for many languages can be found via or . [Larry Tremblay , comp.ai.nat-lang, 17Aug97.]

Eric Schulman's "The History of the Universe in 200 Words or Less" has been translated into 16 other languages. It goes "Quantum fluctuation. Inflation. Expansion. Strong nuclear interaction... World-Wide Web creation. Composition. Extrapolation?" . [mini-AIR, Aug97.]

Microsoft Word has a text summarization capability that selects sentences with the most statistically significant vocabulary. You can view an example at . [Jorn Barger , comp.ai, 24Aug97. David Joslin.] (Barger calls it "pretty hilarious ... most types of documents end up looking pretty random.")