The Poorhouse's discovery of the day: DocTranslate - A heavenly, and free, treat for those of us poor info-workers who deal with several countries, not all of which are polite enough to speak English as their first language.

Using the mighty power of Google Translate, this downloadable program takes as input a Microsoft Word or Powerpoint document and translates it to/from any combination of languages that Google knows. It comes out with some oddities due to the limitations of computer translation at the best of times (although if you’re good at languages you can apparently improve it further), but even so it rather beats one’s random guesses at what any of a particularly dull looking document might mean. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Works on Windows, needs Word/Powerpoint 2003 or 2007. The only elements of confusion were 1) that you need admin rights to install, meaning that you might not be able to put it on your work computer anyway sadly, and 2) you press the blue arrow to translate, not the "Open it" button otherwise you get a "Powerpoint can not open the file" type error.

Both of these points are probably quite obvious to anyone who has not been crying with the fear of having to translate 35 page documents with only a GCSE from 13 years ago to help, but reproduced here just in case...