It seems that since the Internet has become "popular," especially outside of the United States, whatever I'm interested in has a huge German following. The search engines will find many references to German pages or forum postings that look like they might solve my problem or answer my question, if only I could read them.

The best solution I had was a native German who sat next to me at work for some time... if I ran across something, he could just read it to me. Since that situation has changed, now I'm on my own (well, guess I could email them to him, but turnaround time might be a bit much :-).

Since the boating world has continued this trend toward several German/Dutch sites that seem interesting, I've been exercising the online translators more... Babelfish was the old favorite, and now I find that Google can do the same... You can feed them words or point them to an entire web page. Google, at least, has a set of buttons which you can add to your favorites that let you send the current page to the translator.

• http://babelfish.altavista.com/babelfish/tr
• http://translate.google.com/translate_t
  

• http://www.aluriverboat.de/main_entry.htm - A neat home designed and constructed aluminum river craft
• http://www.boote-forum.de/ - An extensive boating forum