I recall visiting a language translator website where words and phrases are translated in real-time as you type them?

is it free?
that’s wicked
hahaha
now i can be french stress-free

I’ve never heard of such a site, and if it does exist, i’d question it’s accuracy. Translation is more than a 1:1 word switch out. there is thought and reason behind everything we say and write. a computer could not guess what you’re going to write.

I know of what you speak, but cannot remember the address

This sounds interesting but dubious, mainly because word order figures more significantly in some languages than in others. It is more important in English than in a highly inflected language such as Latin. In German you would have to wait until the end of a subordinate clause to get to the main verb. I don’t see how this could work and will be curious to see the answer.

Issues of translating whole ideas rather than a string of single words would be factors in any kind of machine translation, but translating as you go is going to be specifically affected by word order.

Here’s a taste of machine translation of a whole passage. (I always love doing this!) I took your first paragraph and used the Google translator to send it sequentially through Greek, Chinese (Traditional), Latvian, French, Russian, Arabic, Finnish, Hindi, Swedish, Maltese, and Polish, and back into English. This is the end result:

If you are, and the question is fluther sentence, for example, you want to see the problem… Only this website contains a number of different languages. Google translation is so different from other sites. I totally know what you remember, however, that right? Something to know if it is?

This looks like some of the stuff I edit professionally.

@Jeruba: What did you type in in the first place?

The first paragraph of the question:

“Similar to how when you type your question in fluther, the words appear below as you type to show what your question will look like…only this website would do it in a number of different languages. This is what made it different from other websites like google translator. I completely forget what it was called though, does anyone remember? Or know of any website that does this?”

@Jeruba and @eponymoushipster: I know it sounds unrealistic but it exists because I have seen it before, and like hug_of_war, I forgot the address (hence my posting this question). The reason why it actually worked was because, similar to how the fluther text has a little bit of a lag as you type, so did this website, so it could process what you were typing to make sure it could be as grammatically accurate as possible given the word order (even if it is far from perfect). The results were probably similar to the crappily-formed sentence that you gave in your example, I guess it was just cool because it did it so quickly. The benefit was that instead of other translator websites in which one would have to click “translate” and load the translation on a new page, this just did it all on the same page as you type. I guess I like it because it’s better for looking up individual words really fast, not entire phrases.

@hug_of_war: please let me know if you remember the address. Thanks.

Well, how about this?

http://www.ajaxtrans.com/

I Googled “translate as you type” and followed links to here.

AH THANK YOU SO MUCH! That’s it.

@Jeruba : “If you are, and the question is fluther sentence, for example, you want to see the problem… Only this website contains a number of different languages. Google translation is so different from other sites. I totally know what you remember, however, that right? Something to know if it is?”? Good grief, woman, just go shoot some fish in a barrel, whydoncha?<grin>

Here is an Ernest Hemingway title alleged to have been translated from English to Chinese to English: “The Corn is Green” became “The Humor is Immature”.

hey, folks, how about some more short examples?