Sacre bleu!  Working for an international company and ordering nachos bell grande is the extent of your foreign language experience?!  Can’t tell your umlaut from an apfelstrudel because it’s all Greek to you?  Then say arrivederci to your new position – if you can pronounce it.

Actually, it’s not that bad.  There’s a smorgasbord of software that can turn incompetence into merely semi-competence in this situation.  Wunderbar!

Google Language Tools (google.com/language_tools) and Yahoo! Babel Fish (babelfish.yahoo.com) accept web page addresses to translate…et voila – results appear pronto.  They also let you paste text into a field to have it translated.  You’ll say ¡Yo quiero el Internet! in no time.

Foreign-language office documents and e-mails causing you angst?  Need to translate while offline?  Language Engineering Company (lec.com) and Systran (systransoft.com), which provides translation services for Babel Fish, offer stand-alone products.  Both allow you to test their technology from their web sites.  Zut alors! .

These programs are far from perfect, and hilarity can ensue when figures of speech enter the picture.  Or, put another way:  These programs are far from the perfection, and hilarity can follow when the figures of the word write the image.

The preceding sentence is the result of round-tripping – translating from English to French (for example), and then translating the French results back into English.  This can lead to mucho humor, so much so that tashian.com/multibabel automates the process for you.

Better still, the 19th century book English as She Is Spoke is an unintentionally funny English phrasebook written for native Portuguese speakers.  The author didn’t speak English, but used a Portuguese-to-French dictionary and a French-to-English dictionary, so what could go wrong?

I think I’m going to be sick becomes I have mind to vomit, for one thing.  See archimedes-lab.org/carolino.html for more, zompist.com/spoke.html for a Babel Fish comparison, or amazon.com for the book itself.

As for actually learning the language, MIT’s OpenCourseWare initiative (ocw.mit.edu) offers free access to college language courses.  Likewise, learning a language lends itself well to listening to lessons.  Browse the iTunes store or oculture.com/2006/10/foreign_languag.html for audio links.  Magnifico!

For offline resources, publishers usually provide CDs or DVDs with their books.  Offerings from Rosetta Stone (rosettastone.com), Berlitz (berlitz.com), and Barron’s (barronseduc.com) are in local bookstores, along with those from Living Language (livinglanguage.com), Topics Entertainment (topics-ent.com), Pimsleur (pimsleur.com), and Penton Overseas (pentonoverseas.com).  Glockenspiel!  (Wait, what?!)

So start working now to become a conquistador of that foreign language.  As a last resort, you could write a song to raise awareness of “the universal language.”  Esperanto:  Why don’t we come to our senses?  We’ve seen the writing on fences, but it’s a hard one (to learn).  Freedom from translators – well, that’s just some people talkin’, but Esperanto should let somebody learn it (let somebody learn it) before it’s too late….  Oh, nevermind.  Adiaux!