After much searching, you've finally obtained a birth certificate of your Italian-born great-grandmother. Your success is somewhat tainted, however: You can't read a word of it. You can't decipher those letters written between your ancestors that you found in a relative's attic, either. What do you do?

Luckily, computers and the Internet have made it a lot easier to untie foreign tongues. You'll find a variety of tools to help you overcome the language barrier in your family history research — online dictionaries, Web-based translating services and software — and many are even free. Where you once had to track down a fluent speaker or struggle through word-by-word with a dictionary, you can now get a basic understanding of those cryptic letters, records and even foreign-language Web sites by simply plugging text into your computer. It's the next best thing to having your own interpreter.

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