I have a client with an office in the Netherlands, writes Nigel Harris, so when I get the records they include a file of PostBank statements, all in Dutch. In the past I have been using the well-known , a free online translation service, which does a pretty good job.

However, this year I was struggling to understand what Babel Fish was telling me and I came across the alternative - another free service. The new development here is that Google is no longer using the Systran translation technology that Babel Fish and most other online translation sites use, so you get an alternative version of your chosen phrase or sentence. In my case I got something that made much more sense, so I'll be using both sites in future just to be sure.

Both these sites have a great range of languages that they translate into English - including chinese, hindi, japanese, russian and arabic where your school modern languages won't even let you guess the meaning.

You can also ask these two services to translate a whole website - just type in the URL - which can be handy if you're checking out foreign holiday websites, for example. Google will even do a foreign language search for you and deliver the results translated into english.