Best free online translation site?

there are at least 5 i know of. which is the best? sometimes the public school i work for needs to send letters home to parents that don’t know english. we need a lot of different languages, but spanish is the most commonly spoken one besides english.

google.com/translate_t
How about this?

I really like this one:
mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.p … =translate

I don’t know how the translation quality stacks up against other web sites. (It’s pretty wonky with names and technical terminology.) But what I like is that below the translation the web site gives a list of word-by-word definitions in the order of the original sentence; I often skip the translation itself and go down to this list to read the original sentence as kind of an “annotated” text.

[quote=“Lil’ Slugger”]I really like this one:
mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.p … =translate

I don’t know how the translation quality stacks up against other web sites. (It’s pretty wonky with names and technical terminology.) But what I like is that below the translation the web site gives a list of word-by-word definitions in the order of the original sentence; I often skip the translation itself and go down to this list to read the original sentence as kind of an “annotated” text.[/quote]

Thanks for the site. It’s pretty cool. (Site translation - 感謝站點。相當涼快的 - which is somewhat inaccurate, but if you change the English to, “Thanks for the website. It’s useful.” you get - 感謝網站。這是有用的 - which is better.)

You just need to tinker with the English a bit to get a better result. I also like the break down of character meanings at the bottom. It seems like a useful tool.