Website reviews

As before, all these sites are very useful on a frequent basis and all work well and easily, so no marks will be awarded for merit this month.

Babelfish

http://babelfish.altavista.com

Named after the Douglas Adams creation, but without the same need for aural insertion, Babelfish is an online translation tool. Simply type in a phrase in English, press the button and it will translate to any of 11 foreign languages (or vice versa). Alternatively, you can enter the URL of a webpage you wish to translate. I entered the web address for Brazilian law firm Farah, Gomes e Silva and asked for a translation from Portuguese to English. Babelfish obliged, providing the original website with all the same graphics and layout, but in (somewhat stilted and sometimes confusing) English. Babelfish also boasts an email translation facility, a tool to download to allow visitors to your own website to translate it, and “seamless translation plug-ins” for various popular software applications including Word and Outlook Express. Even if you have no legitimate use for this, it’s good fun to translate things from English into Japanese (or Greek, Italian or whatever) then back into English.

Currency Exchange

www.xe.com

If I understand it correctly this website allows you to change your currency online. I make no comment on that service as I have not used it. However, I have used the free currency conversion tool which operates to give the current “mid-market rates” for each currency and work out how many yen there are to a peso or dollars to a euro. For more advanced transactions you may need to make use of the currency tables. These are available for a truly dizzying number of currencies, some of which I was not even aware existed (and some which no longer do). Usefully, the tables are available for specified dates stretching as far back as 16 November 1995, which means the value of historical claims can be calculated too.

World Clock

www.timeanddate.com/worldclock

World Clock tells you the time in any of a large number of cities around the globe. Select a city and the site will tell you what time it is there, how far ahead or behind Greenwich Mean Time that is and any daylight saving time arrangements in place. More, it will provide the city’s international dialling code and its longitude and latitude. You can also customise a page as your own personal world clock, specifying up to 16 different places you want to know the time in simultaneously.

Furthermore, the site has a meeting planner facility. Let’s say I (based in Glasgow) had arranged a telephone conference call between myself and two colleagues, one in Washington DC, the other in Rome. If I want to call on 2 November 2004, I enter all these details into the planner and it will let me know when a convenient time to call might be, so no-one has to conduct business in their pyjamas. This turns out to be 2-4pm in Glasgow, which is 3-5pm in Italy and 9-11am in Washington.

Royal Mail

www.royalmail.com

This website rates a mention for two online tools. One is its postcode finder, which will yield the postcode for any address in the UK. The second is a postage calculator, which tells you how many stamps to put on a letter or parcel depending on its weight, where it’s going and how fast it’s getting there. Both are rather simple to use and periodically very useful. Just follow the links from the homepage.

BT Directory Enquiries

www.bt.com

Again, you’ll have to follow the links from the homepage (towards the bottom). In the furore over all the new 118 directory enquiry services, it has been overlooked by many that you can still get a service absolutely free. This one not only saves several pence per minute, but is also usually quicker than phoning a 118 number. You can find the phone number of an individual by entering their name and (even partial) address, or business numbers listed either by name or by type of business.

Yell

www.yell.co.uk

In similar vein, this is the online version of Yellow Pages. It does all the things your paper version does, but with some added bells and whistles. For example, having found all the accountants in one city, it will draw you a map locating each of them. Having selected one in particular, it will give you directions on how to get from wherever you are to wherever they are. Brilliantly, it even differentiates depending whether you are driving or walking.

The web review column is written by Iain A Nisbet of Govan Law Centre.
e: iain@absolvitor.co.uk