Here, for example, is a sentence from a World Cup report from a Madrid newspaper: 'Passing Switzerland, Spain is now in the hands of the video and suture.' Frequently the system has the fluency of a barely competent human translator, one who happens to be both distracted and drunk.

Spend more time with the software, though, and you realize while Google Translate is often spot-on perfect, especially with simple sentences from structurally simple languages like Spanish, it can produce puzzling sentences. That, at least, is the impression you get as a new user.

When you first encounter it, there is a whiff of sci-fi make-believe about this tearing down of ancient language barriers. Give it a Web page from a Spanish newspaper and in about a second the text is converted to English. Google Translate is a free Google service that translates between scores of languages almost as quickly as Google returns search results. Which is quite an admission, because Och is responsible for one of the most amazing computer programs in the world: He is head of the division at Ask Franz Josef Och the same question, though, and he says that even with a machine a thousand times more powerful than today's his program wouldn't run significantly better than it does right now, as far as most people could tell.

Mean in spanish google translate