Have you ever been faced by a situation where you've received some text in a strange language but you can't identify what it is?

Polyglot 3000 (despite sounding like some kind of wall filler!) is a language recognition package which recognizes more than 400 languages. Simply paste in the text that you need identifying and P3000 will immediately throw up suggestions as to what it could be. The program is lightning fast at detecting the language of the text and it also gives you an estimate of how accurate the results are (which is usually 100% although if the language shares similar words with another language, it may be slightly lower). As far as customisation goes, it's very limited though with the only real option being that of setting it to check for only popular languages. However, with so many languages in use over the internet, this program is an excellent starting point for anyone trying to identify the origin of a blog language or website that they don't understand.

If you're just looking for a one stop, simple way to identify the language of some mysterious text, Polyglot 3000 will do it in a flash but note that it doesn't perform any kind of translation.