You’ve just got back from vacation where you had a hugely fun time, and met lots of nice people. Perhaps someone even a little bit special? But the problem is they speak a different language to you, and you can’t wait until one of you learns the other’s lingo. How to keep the flame going without spending a fortune?

Clownfish Translator to the rescue. This super handy little Skype plugin, lets you chat away in any of a bunch of languages, basically all the major ones that Google Translate supports. Just install the software and the next time you need to contact your biggest supplier in Kazakhstan, fire it up and start chatting in Skype. The program will automatically insert the relevant translation into the text box for you, after your own text.

Don’t expect anything more than rudimentary machine translation though (we were joking about trusting it for business unless you absolutely have no choice), so the results could be a little patchy to say the least. But it’s definitely better than nothing when you have to chat to someone urgently. I once used Google Translate to chat to a car repair garage via email on vacation in Italy, and it got me out of a very tight spot, so it can work brilliantly.

Oh and as an added bonus, Clownfish comes with a couple of added value features, like a Skype voice call recorder and a voice changer for a bit of annoying fun. Nice!