There are many useful resources for Computer Assisted Translation available to computer users today, just as there are now many online newspapers and other free sources of Japanese text. Here is a popular column from the Asahi Shimbun, "tensei jingo" captured from their website. I like to practice Japanese by reading this column every day. Today's column is about the war in Kosovo and Albania. I've highlighted the passage I want to translate.

I copy the passage, and move to a web-based dictionary and paste it in. You can paste in any Japanese text in digital form.

You can reach WWWJDIC at this address:

http://www.dgs.monash.edu.au/~jwb/wwwjdic.html

Now I just hit "Begin Translation" and the dictionary server will break up the sentences and look for words and kanji compounds in its dictionary. It isn't really a translation, but a "gloss" of the keywords. Its not perfect, it misses a few words, but has good accuracy, the dictionary is constantly being updated, and its free via the web!

That's a pretty good gloss of the keywords in the first line of the paragraph. If you read any native materials like newspapers, you've probably made glossary lists for further study and memorization. You can print these out for later study, or study them online in parallel with the original text.

Let's try a different translator on this text.