What’s the easiest (and accurate) way to get some text translated into many languages, for free?

imposterprofessoroak: What’s the easiest (and accurate) way to get some text translated into many languages, for free?
Hello!

I’m working on a webcomic. One of the jokes refers to the “Language” option screen on games. As the characters franticly attempt to locate “English” again in the menu, their dialog is to appear in various interesting looking languages.

What I want to do is translate the dialog into a handful of “interesting looking languages”, such as:

English (intro and punchline), Russian, German, Japanese, Basque, Chinese, Greek, Hebrew, etc.

I’m looking for an interesting mix of words that use familiar letterforms but interesting grammar/spelling (German), languages that look like they SHOULD be easily recognized (Russian), and languages with really wild and interesting letterforms (Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew).

As this is a webcomic, I can’t really afford a professional translation service. Where might I find volunteer translators for a few lines, or a paragraph at most? I want the dialog to be idiomatic and natural, not machine translated and choppy.
An automated translation would be just as bad in this instance as simply picking random interesting letters and stringing ’em togeather.

If somebody who natively reads Japanese sees the comic, I would like for them to understand their specific speech bubble. Or if somebody punches the bubble’s contents into babelfish, etc, I want them to have clean text to translate.

Eventually, I’d like to have the comic series translated; this is a segway into that to see how feasable such an undertaking would be (and, no, I’m not planning on locking in anyone who does a simple paragraph into translating the series; think of it as a trial balloon)
I have posted a “Translation Project” page onto the server alongside the webcomic. It can be accessed at this URL:

Details on the text to be translated, the goals, and submission path are there.

I’m also going to follow any advice listed here on pursuing other sources of translation.

Answers and Views:

Answer by nanz_03
have u tried dictionary.com??

Answer by Snickers
did you try babelfish.com?

Answer by fallstaff
just post the text here, ppl will translate it, if it is big spread it in several questions at giving one day of interval.

Answer by Tom
Here are two sites:

If you need to translate into languages not covered by these sites, you might want to try using a search engine with the three words: translation english language_you’re_looking_for (i.e. translation english german).

Understand that these translation sites are very generic, and that the translation you get won’t be the same as the actual native language; the grammar will appear much as a foreign site translated by such as BabelFish appears to us, (e.g. “Broken English”).

Answer by Erik Van Thienen
I’m willing to do the Dutch, if necessary. Email me via my profile.

Answer by refugiotrans
Try posting in the Kudoz section of Proz.com. Volunteers will translate sentences or phrases of ten words or less.

Answer by gabbahshareef
You’ll find it lying next to the heaviest, lightest, blackest, white-est, wrong-est, right-est thing.

Answer by [email protected]
type dictionary,translation (then type what lang to what lang)