I want to use Babelfish to translate my English text into French and then send the translation to my Lotus Word Pro so that I can put it in a letter format and print it. How can I do this?

Here's your note in French: "Je voudrais employer Babelfish pour traduire mon texte anglais au Francais ... " Instead of the Babelfish service offered by AltaVista.com, I used the competing Google tool, which seems better to me. It handles back-and-forth translations between English and French, Spanish, German, Italian and Portuguese. Babelfish handles those and also Japanese and Chinese, but Google's interface is easier to use.

I painted your question in my e-mail software using the mouse cursor to define it and then pressed CTRL-C to copy it into memory. Then I went to the Language Tools at Google.com and moved the cursor into the form where one enters what is to be translated. I then pressed CTRL-V to paste it into the form and initiate the translation service on the site.

I reversed the process to paste the translation into the word processor I use to write these columns. You can do the same thing in Lotus Word Pro.

I am running Windows 95 but cannot open anything because a window keeps coming up that says that the program cannot locate "winsvic." What could have caused this problem and how may it be corrected?

There are frequent problems caused by corruption of the driver software for the Cypress Semiconductors chips designed to handle peripheral cards attached to many computers. Log on to the www.cypress.com and type "winsvic" as a search term. You will be given access to download an uncorrupted version of the drivers. You may need to register with Cypress to get access to the page.

James Coates writes for the Chicago Tribune, a Tribune Publishing newspaper. He can reached via e-mail at jcoates @tribune.com.