Background: To facilitate the dissemination of Cochrane Reviews it will be necessary to translate some, if not all, of the review text. As an initial step in this process we looked at the use of automated translation of the abstracts of completed reviews, which could be considered as an attractive option. The objective was to test one free Internet software package on a small sub-sample of abstracts of completed Cochrane reviews

Methods: the abstract (the first in the alphabetical list) from reviews completed within the review groups with most reviews were extracted into a Word document. This in turn was fed through the Babelfish software (http://babel.altavista.com/translate.dyn)and translated into French, German, Italian and Spanish (Afrikaans, Ndebele, Pedi, Sotho, Swazi, Tsonga, Tswana, Venda, Xhosa, Zulu are not available). These translations were, in turn, fed back into the translation software to be returned to English.

Results: The results of this process will be presented but from initial work it seems that this particular software package will not replace the services of a person who is both fluent in the relevant languages and has some understanding of the work.