@Lisa: thank you for the correction (and I’m happy to hear my website is useful). I noticed there were some differences between what Babel Fish came up with versus how Google translated words – another was Google gave “Referenz” as the German translation for “reference” – machine translation is still far from perfect.

In fact, a writer I used to know took advantage of the quirks of machine translation when he was suffering from writer’s block or was unhappy with a particular passage. He would enter his text, translate it to one language, then translate from that language to a third, and then finally back to English. Sometimes the resulting word jumble would inspire him with new phrasing or word order, and get him back to writing.

Actually, I don’t know why Babelfish decided to translate library as “архив” because, like English, that actually means archive in Russian. The Russian word for library is “библиотека” – “biblioteka”, coming from the Greek like many of the other languages.

Thanks for the site. It is continually interesting!