Developer's Guide - Google AJAX Language API - Google Code

Over the last few months I've been attempting to learn Portuguese, and, having finally been dismayed by the lack of an API from Babelfish (formerly AltaVista, now Yahoo!), I was pleasantly surprised to see that Google now has a translation service.

I'm really excited about this, since not only do they have a decent translation page, they're also exposing an API:

Developer's Guide - Google AJAX Language API - Google Code

Way to go, Google!

This opens doors for applications, both web and [internet connected] desktop, to perform translations.

They also have the ability to detect the source language, but I'm not sure how useful that would be for me personally, but it's a cool feature nonetheless.