Roommate Emails

During my search for home-sweet-home in Madrid, I've been cobbling together emails in Spanish to potential roommates. Most of my emails seem to have been understood on the receiving end, and I must give thanks to Babel Fish in helping me accomplish this http://babelfish.yahoo.com!





I've been using Babel Fish -- the fabulous online translation utility -- as a back up to check my continually improving (I hope) Spanish.

Babel Fish can translate blocks of text or full web pages to and from 12 languages. Beware, though! Although this utility tries to match up the meaning of the original language to the translated language, it is not 100% accurate -- something for which, in the name of corporate integrity, I am glad that Babel Fish is quite up front about in their website FAQ. For instance, internship (English) is puesto de interno (Spanish) which means something like station of internal. My Spanish is probably at the intermediate level and I could be wrong, but this didn't sound right. In doubt, I used the English word -- internship-- and crossed my fingers.

As I said, I haven't had trouble communicating with potential Madrileño roommates so far. However, I'm still working on my Spanish, so, really, how would I be able to tell anyway?