The time has come at last, you have made the decision to take the plunge and start a correspondence with a lady from a Russian-speaking country - inevitably (I speak from my own experience!), you will receive letters or emails from her in either broken English, or a garbled mixture of English and Russian! Even if you are fortunate to meet a lady who speaks good English, you will undoubtedly wish to learn more about her culture - one of the best ways to do this is to browse websites and newsgroup postings originating in her home country.

Unless you are fortunate enough to be a fluent Russian speaker yourself, you will need some method of translating from Russian to your native tongue (and vice versa). We have put together a collection of links to websites offering either online machine translation or shareware translation programs. The quality of the final translation will vary from surprisingly accurate, to laughably (even embarrassingly!) inaccurate, but should be adequate for getting the gist of a letter or article. We would not recommend that you use any of these for translating a letter from yourself to your new friend, unless she has a well developed sense of humour!

Online Translation
AltaVista's Babel Fish Translation Service	Visit Website
Free online translation of up to 150 words at a time.
PROMT Online	Visit Website
Free online multilingual translation software for English, French, German, Russian and Spanish languages.
English-Russian Dictionary	Visit Website
Free online English to Russian dictionary.
Dima Chirkin - English-Russian Dictionary	Visit Website
Free online English to Russian and Russian to English dictionary (supports both koi8 and cp1251 encoding).
Translation Software
Smartlink Corporation	Visit Website
Good selection of Translation software, from entry level to powerful, professional packages.
LogoMedia Translate Russian	Visit Website
A suite of programs to translate as you type, translate a sentence or two and then pop the translation into another application, translate your primary window (Use it to translate web pages, email or documents) or translate whole files or folders, including HTML.
Systran	Visit Website
SYSTRAN's family of desktop products offers state-of-the-art translation technology, from personal to business needs.
Pragma 2.0	Visit Website
Translation for English, Russian, and Ukrainian in any direction. Highly usable downloadable demo.