Ok, here is a question I've not seen asked, but may have missed somewhere.

As I am trying to plan our trip to Italy, occasionally, I need to request further information from a Hotel by e-mail.

What I have been doing is typing out my message in English and using a web-translator such as Babelfish and translate my question to Italian and post it under the English version, sending both versions. I wanted to be sure the Hotel staff could understand my question, but I recently used a couple of these services to translate some info from a train schedule in Italian and the results were almost unintelligible.

I know that most Italians working in the tourism fields have at least some English-speaking skills, but I don't want to presume it. Has anyone else tried a web-translator and found it accurate?

I, for one, have never bothered to use a web translator for any e-mail request to any hotel and have had total success.

Believe me, this is BUSINESS and if the person who reads the e-mail on the other end cannot understand it (and you'll never know, ever) they will quickly get someone who can.

Nice of you to do but, frankly, I think it is totally unnecessary.

When I e-mail a major hotel I simply write in English. When we've wanted information or reservartions from a B&B, however, I do use the web translator and communicate in both languages.
I have received answers back in Italian, English, or English through the web translator which are sometimes good for a laugh. I assume they had a laugh at the other end also.

Hello Mr.Green. I concur that when you write to a hotel in Italy you can get by just writing in English. As Intrepid said, the hotel will get a translation if they do not have someone there who can understand English. I have yet to know a hotel in Italy that did not have an English speaking employee (except for a few in very small towns).

I have a horrible personal aversion to automated translations that are currently available on the web or on the general market. Just as already stated, the results can be comical; but sometimes they can be very misleading and perhaps disappointing. It takes practically no time to use a dictionary that will provide you (in most cases) an appropriate word, and with a little grammatical understanding in the language of your interest, you can construct a decent message that will be understood. On the other hand, if you write your communications in simple basic English, there will always be someone on the other end who understands.

The only exception I can recall is when I sent a letter to a hotel in the former Yugoslavia and wrote in 4 languages to try to get my message across. There was no reply, but when I arrived the reservations had been made and I had a pleasant visit. There was a clerk there later who had a minimal capability in English (I didn't know Serbo-Croatian) who told me that if I hadn't written the letter in several languages, it would not have been understood by anyone else on the hotel staff. Which language of the four did they best understand? It was Russian.

Hi MG,

Keep doing what you have been doing.

Even if the translation is gibberish, they appreciate that you tried.