Anyone got any tips on translating journal articles? I did 2 years Italian, along with 5 in Latin, and trying to read papers in Italian...is there any easier way than settling down with a dictionary and looking up every third or fourth word?

There are free machine translation services on the net - Babelfish (http://babelfish.altavista.com/) is perhaps the best known. However I wouldn't recommend them, perhaps it would come in handy if you are trying to get a general idea of the paper but if you really need to use it as one of your main references you will find that in the automatic translation there are many sentences which don't make any sense or which are misleading.

But reading academic articles in a foreign language is much more easier than most people believe (well in my opinion)! A bit difficult at the beginning but soon you will be familiar with the specialistic vocabulary of your field plus the style of academic articles is not terribly obscure. It's much more easier to read an academic article in a field you know well in a foreign language than to read say a novel for teenagers or a gossip magazine in this same foreign language.

I use babelfish if can to get the context of the abstract, but most of my texts are through inter-library loans.

From my experience it doesn't take long to memorse the words that come up most often, so before long you won't need the dictionary so much. I'd stick with it, not many people can speak Italian and it's worth keeping up your exposure to the language.

I only know basic conversational Swedish, but I can read museum published natural history texts (the Swedes are fab at these!)okay, with a bit of help from a dictionary. It has got to the stage where I can read words and recognise what they mean - but have no idea how they sound!!! Especially things like twelve letter compound words!

Cheers everyone My supervisor said today she help me to an extent if there was a paper I was not understanding.