This is a very spiffy little site. Enter in an English word, and see the most common translated word in a variety of European nations.
Originally shared by +Yonatan Zunger:
Here's an interesting site, via +Laura Gibbs: it uses Google Translate to show you the translations of any word across Europe. This is a great way to see the major linguistic groups in Europe, especially the Romance, Germanic, and Slavic languages. Very "modern" words, like "microprocessor," are nearly identical in all countries, having been borrowed from a single source.
Words which represent things that would have been present when the speakers of various other languages invaded their current homes, such as "cow" instead break up along language family lines; you can see all the variations on Latin "vaca" in Romance-speaking areas, variations on "korova" in Slavic-speaking areas, and variants on proto-Germanic "kwon" in Germanic-speaking areas.
With very old words, you start to get into the subject of historical linguistics, and in fact these deviation patterns turn into a way to know where and when various people split up: if they have the same word for "cow," for example, you can reasonably believe that they were in contact with each other at a time when cows were common enough things to get a common name. However, this is a subtle business: you have to understand how word-sounds evolve over time, and deal with the ways in which sometimes a less-common word for something becomes the dominant word in an area. For example, the word for "dog" in almost all Germanic languages is a variation on "hound," coming ultimately from proto-Germanic "hundas" and proto-Indo-European "kuntas." But English took the word "docga," a name for a particular kind of dog, and by the 16th century this had become the general word for the species.
If you want to learn more about historical linguistics — it's a completely fascinating subject — John McWhorter's lectures, "The Story of Human Language" (http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3328218-the-story-of-human-language) can be a great place to understand not only that, but the basic ideas of all of linguistics.
European word translator: an interactive map showing “cow” in over 30 languages
Translate any word from English to more than 30 other European languages, on a map
This is very useful for name/word generation. puts it in his back pocket
YESSS