My family and I will be relocating to Switzerland this summer and I am trying to learn as much as possible prior to our arrival. Currently, we are looking for houses on various online sites. I noticed some sites have an English option to translate the language to English. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to find this option on a lot of sites. Google Translate has been very helpful, but it is very time consuming copying and pasting all the content into Google. On one of the House Hunting Blogs, someone mentioned there is a way to program your computer to translate all websites to English. I have tried to figure out how to do this with no success. Would anyone be able to tell me how to program my computer to translate all languages to English? I thought it might be under System Preferences under Language but I couldn’t find it and the online Help hasn’t been very helpful for me. Thanks in advance for your help!

Use Google Chrome browser:

http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en...tml?brand=GGRE

As recommended above, Chrome is very good and offers a pop-up translate toolbar everytime a non-English web page is displayed.

I also use Firefox and have the following add-on toolbar installed:

http://www.unlimited-translate.org/

There are one-click icons for translate whole page, highlighted text or individual words.

EDIT: if you choose to use this, just be careful not to include the options for Babylon. and set Google Translate as default. Babylon is another online translator service, but it can change some of your browser default settings. However, despite this warning, I think it was only a problem for me when I directly downloaded it (Babylon - to try out) - can't exactly remember - long time back. The toolbar itself (above link) though is very good.

More on Google Translate and the Virtual Foreign Keyboard in this thread.

You don't need to copy and paste the text into Google. A bit further down the Google Language Tools page it says "Translate a web page". Simply enter the site URL and the language to translate from, and then that site is in english. You can click around and each page is then in english without any more action.

e.g.
http://translate.google.co.uk/transl...ww.admin.ch%2F

Or you can install the google toolbar into IE and there is a translate button (or you can set it translate automatically by default....but I personally prefer to do it manually each time)

I use that but stick it on auto. very helpful.

Thanks so much for all this advice. I'll try some of these ideas later today and let you know how I make out! Thanks again for the help!