Translate.google.com is actually pretty good.

Why don't you just contact some from the italian owner's list? They might speak enough english and know who has what you're looking for, and there are a number that currently have it in Italy.

Keep the language very simple--no idioms (e.g., beat around the bush, drop of a hat, burning the midnight oil, etc), puns, wordplay, abbreviations, or American-specific phrases (e.g., the down low, ballpark figure, out in the boondocks, etc). It might take a little effort and creative thinking to work around all that since those are fairly commonplace in English, but they don't translate well into other languages/cultures.

If you can avoid all those and pretend you are writing in a way that a 5-year-old could possibly understand, then google translate can work reasonably well. Otherwise, the translations can sometimes get garbled and might not make sense.

Then as a sanity check, take the Italian that it generates and run it through the translator to get English again. If it's garbled, you'll either have to simplify your words, break sentences/thoughts into smaller chunks, use alternate words, avoid words with possibly multiple meanings, and/or try to use more specific language.

For example, instead of "out in the boondocks", use something like "in an isolated area". "Isolated" is a better word choice than "remote" in this case, since remote could mean more than one thing.

That was PERFECT advice! I do this a lot in communicating with my German and Spanish speaking friends. If you write in simple sentences, and try to 'think' like the recipient, you get an excellent product from Google Translate. And yes, copy and paste the finished translation and reverse it. Have it to translate from the foreign language back into English. Sometimes you will see how wacky your phraseology is and you need to simplify it even more

He should be able to easily do that. And when anyone in Italy reads it, they will most certainly understand the difficulty he is having trying to communicate and will probably answer back in English. Most Europeans speak English also.
Mike in Kentucky

No idioms? How is Jed Clampett supposed to be able to do that? "Well doggy"

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