Background: Cochrane reviews do not restrict included studies to those published in the English language. However potential studies in languages other than English may require translation prior to assessment of their eligibility. Free online translation programmes may be of value for initial assessment. Objectives: To evaluate the accuracy of Google Translate for the selection of trials in languages other than English for inclusion in Cochrane reviews. Methods: We selected a sample of Cochrane reviews. One person will extract the list of included and excluded studies written in German or Portuguese and their eligibility for respective reviews. Another blinded researcher, not proficient in these languages, will examine whether the texts match the inclusion criteria of the review using the Google Translator tool. The agreement between original inclusion and results after online translation will then be quantified (κ test). Results: In a pilot study, using one Cochrane review with 11 German articles, we used Google Translator to evaluate the articles’ potential for inclusion, inter-rater agreement was 73% (κ=0.38). Additional Cochrane reviews which evaluated studies in German and Portuguese will be added until October 2009. Conclusions: The pilot study shows that the Google Translator tool could be a potential tool for Cochrane authors to translate German articles. We will further investigate the reliability of this tool for German and Portuguese articles.