In this week's Reader's Mailbag, one reader seeks to bridge the language barrier via IM to find out more about her heritage.

Q: This is a weird question, but is there an easy way to translate IMs from one langage to another? I found kin living in France while researching my family tree and would love to communicate with them (their website provides screennames!) but I am not very fluent. --Heidi S., Florida

Dear Heidi,

I never really considered the language barriers over IM until your letter and luckily found a pretty neat application you can use to IM with your family in France.

IM Translator 3.0, for AIM, ICQ, Windows Live Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger, provide a pretty seamless experience for translating from a multitude of languages into English and back. With this application, you can select a message and with a single keystroke, IM Translator changes the text, such as "Parlez vous Anglais?" into "Do you speak English?"

Download the application for free or try the web-based version for quick translation without a download.

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