You have to love the internet.

Last night I got a 34-page legal document in Spanish that my attorneys weren't going to be able to translate in the 20 minutes I had before I needed to leave the office.

So I found an internet service who does this. Back in 2000 in San Francisco, we leased office space to a dotcom who provided document translation services (they went belly-up). So I knew the services existed, but I had thought for a long legal document, you would be looking at least at a 24-hour turn time. How wrong I was.

It turns out, you can get up to 750 words translated for free (and it erases all formatting), but you can pay a small fee ($4 per month) and get "all you can eat" translation. The drawback, of course, is that the electronic translations are very literal, so they could be improved a great deal.

Of course, the website offers technical translating services by a human for a higher fee...sort of like carpet cleaners..."Sure we had an advertisement for $5.99 per room...but that's actually a spit-shine for your carpet... if you want a cleaning, that will be $50 per room."

Anyway, I was very impressed with this service. In two minutes, I signed up, paid my $12 for three months, and the auto-installer installed the translation toolbar in word and in my e-mail.

I then hit the magic "translate" button and viola, less than a minute later, it had uploaded my Spanish doc, translated it, and downloaded the English doc back to me, with all formatting intact from the Spanish doc.

And it's not just Spanish, I can now get translations in French, Dutch, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Italian, and German. Don't think I will need, but you never know!

Of course, the quality of the translated doc I received back last night is not that great, but it is absolutely readable, and for the most part, comprehensible. It is funny on names...it leaves most names alone, but it offers literal translations when available. For example, one of the attorneys has a middle name that translates literally to "Stolen" and other parties involved, for example, have middle names that translate literally to "Warlike" and "Bearlike." Therefore, I have names on the English document (and I am now making these up for privacy) such as "Miguel Bearlike Rodriguez" and "Eduardo Warlike Calderon."

Now, back to work.