If you are having difficulty translating documents from "the old country," a bilingual dictionary can be a great help. If the country in question is Sweden, Lexin is an online tool provided by Swedish SchoolNet, a service of the Swedish Agency for School Development. The translation service is available at no charge.
This online dictionary isn't designed specifically for use by English-speaking genealogists. In fact, it is designed for people going in the opposite direction: those from English-speaking countries who are immigrants living within Sweden. However, the tool is available to everyone in the world who has web access, and it seems to work well in both directions: from Swedish to English as well as from English to Swedish.
Usage couldn't be simpler: enter a word, select whether to go from Swedish to English or in the other direction, and then click on TRANSLATE. A few seconds later the equivalent word in the other language appears on your screen. The Swedish alphabet has twenty-nine letters with å, ä, and ö in addition to all the letters we use in English. These three extra letters do not appear on English keyboards, so this site allows you to substitute the characters }, { and | in their place.
The Online Swedish - English Dictionary translates single words at a time; it cannot translate entire sentences, paragraphs, or web pages at once. It is free of charge and is available at http://lexin.nada.kth.se/swe-eng.shtml.
For those who wish to translate more than one word at a time in a choice of several languages, including Swedish, look at SYSTRANBox at http://www.systranbox.com/systran/box. While the translations are not perfect and the grammar is sometimes amusing, SYSTRANBox does a credible job of translating sentences, paragraphs, or even entire web sites.
