Studying Abroad

I was talking to my cousin over the weekend and she told me that she's applied to some study abroad programs for the summer. She applied to one in London and one in Germany and she's currently waiting to hear if she got accepted. I'm sure she'll have a great experience no matter where she ends up.

She was talking about needed to work on her German if she ends up in that program, and it made me think of an old story from my college days. A friend of mine dated a guy who used a company that did translating services to, um, "help" with his work for his foreign language classes. The fact that this was just slightly unethical and defeated the purpose of studying a language in the first place seemed to escape him. Needless to say, she's not dating him anymore.

But this old story got me to thinking that in today's world where everyone is online constantly, maybe it would be possible to use translation services in a legitimate way to help your study of a language. For example, you could compare your own translation of something with the one from the translation service, or send them your own translation and have them put it back into English to see how far off you were. If you find a translation company company that has reasonable rates and works quickly, it could be helpful.

And of course it's always helpful to know of a good translation company (or an Übersetzungsbüro, as translation companies are apparently called in Germany. Awesome word.) if you're going to be abroad for a long time. One like Translia is good because they have three different levels to choose from depending on whether you're talking about something informal or more important. I think I'll suggest them to my cousin...as long as she agrees to use them for legitimate business only.