The value of RSS feeds was demonstrated to me today- I got an alert from the feed I set up to google systems from blogspot, about the new beta google translation tool. The actual translation tool is not perfect but babelfish isn't perfect either. The real winner is the SEARCH & TRANSLATE tool- it rocks! You can search for a topic, select the translation you want & off you go eg a search for "peking duck" brings up a list of relevant Chinese websites AND translated English versions of them. So you could do a search for a patron & bring up a list of results for them in their language ( as long as it s one of the languages google covers- it's not comprehensive but does include trad & simplified Chinese, Arabic, Spanish, German, French etc.)
PLUS you can get toolbar buttons to translate text into the language you want, even the whole webpage. Try translating your library homepage. It's so clever that if you translate the page into Chinese & follow a link, it translates the page you link to as well! While the translations are not perfect, they are readable & it is only in beta. I can see lots of potential in this
http://www.google.com/translate_t
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