My friend Lorie, who is wise in the ways of translations as she speaks French, Spanish, and Italian (a bit) in addition to English, responded to my translation spam [1] I received:
I just read your entry about Babel Fish Translations.
5 bucks a month for 8 languages would have been my first clue that they weren't legit. At my current job, interpreters garner about 30-40 bucks an hour … 2 hour minimum.
Overseas, depending on where you go those costs can increase to 300-400 bucks (case in point, we needed someone for Poland and in that's what our Singapore office quoted us).
For Translation services … the average cost is about .59 a word …
Oh … by the by …
The French and Spanish versions aren't so hot. They look “Angla-cized.”
Well, you can get nearly every page translated for free at Babelfish [2] (although there is a limit to the size of the page) and once a page is translated (for a static site like Conman Laboratories [3] you don't really need a monthly update (well, some pages yes, but overall the site doesn't change all that much).
Plus, Apache [4] can be configured to automatically serve up the appropriage pages based on langauge in a user's browser (as part of the content negotiation process in HTTP (HyperText Transport Protocol)); there is no real need to offer links to other languages, except perhaps as a curtesy for broken or misconfigured browsers.