Have any EF'ers have found an easy, reliable method to translate documents and letters from German/French into English?

Most of the mail we receive regarding health insurance, taxes, and anything from the city of Zürich is not in English. I have tried manually typing each document into Google Translate (very time consuming). I also have looked into scanning to PDF, using a free OCR software application, and then copying the output to Google Translate. The main problem with this is that I have not found an OCR application that works reliable, especially for German.

Suggestions?

Either learn German or get some better OCR software. What other options could there be? The one google use is good and free.

MS OneNote has OCR built in.

I use a Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500 to capture all of my incoming documents (along with Evernote to store them). The OCR technology is built into the hardware and does a great job of capturing the data, ready for a cut-and-paste into Google Translate.

As an added bonus, you can also very easily copy-and-paste the long numbers from the bottom of the pink slips attached to most invoices you get in Switzerland.

I don't usually get excited about office equipment, but the S1500 is a great piece of kit and worth every penny.

I feel your pain. When we first arrived we would take 2-3 hours a week, after the kids were all safely tucked into bed, to labour over our incoming post and work out what it meant, using a combination of google translate and a german-english dictionary, and our basic (very basic!) language skills.
If we were very unsure, he'd take it to work and ask a colleague for assistance...

The good news is, work away at it and it does get easier. These days I can mostly skim what I have without needing to translate anything, and I take a guess first before checking with my husband what he thinks of it...

It did suck at the beginning, but it's also the best language teaching you're going to get - highly motivated!

My favorite translator is taking the letter to work and asking a colleague to verify what I think it says.

"Dear Mr. Jones,

Thank you for your interest in reliable services. Unfortunately, we regret to inform you that our services are Swiss, and are therefore only punctual. We cannot guarantee the quality of our services however. The cost of this letter to respond to your inquiry is 150CHF and is due in 3 days. The charge for a complimentary reminder is 50CHF. Please pay by post. Sorry, but no other form of payment is accepted.

Regards,
Customer Service"

I generally scan the letters (300dpi), feed them into FreeOCR with the German language pack installed, then copy the output into Google Translate. As long as the scan is reasonable and the letter's not typed in some stupid font (the kindergarten uses a "fun" font for its' letters... grrr) it only takes a few minutes normally. Good luck!

Google goggles for your smartphone can be pretty handy, comes as part of the google app. Take a photo of the text you want to translate and off it goes.

It's not brilliant, it doesn't seem to cope with a whole page of A4 for example, but for short bits of text it can be quite handy.

After struggling for over a year (my two boys are in Swiss public schools) I finally found the answer to quickly translate documents and school notes.... the best OCR software for the money.

ABBYY FineReader Express from the Mac Apple Store. http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/abbyy...12310371?mt=12

It is quite amazing. Price is well worth it for $99. You can download a trial version for about 15 days. You can select up to three languages at a time to recognize. I've been extremely impressed.

Wow, thanks for all the great ideas everybody! I'll be looking forward to getting more mail so I can try out some of these methods to see which works best. Thanks!