Help with Google Translate please...

[Phalconphixer]

OK... when using Google as a search engine one often comes across a page which can be translated 'wholesale' such as various original Spanish Wikipedia entries... also google translate allows translation of foreign website such as, in my case various Spanish newspapers... except that in my case using this laptop with Windows 7 I cannot!
What I get is this..!
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v13/foxbat/Capture_zpsuhknyvtt.jpg

If I type in text to the 'to be translated' box or. if I highlight cut and paste from the pages that wont translate directly into the box, it all works fine...
Any ideas?

[G0ULI]

Just issuing an instruction to Google to translate the page rather than highlighting the text you want translated probably starts to try and translate the hypertext markup language used to create the page (all the hidden bits that set the page layout, text size, colour, and image positions). This of course results in nonsense.

When you highlight, or cut and paste text, you strip away all the hidden superfluous nonsense, so Google "knows" what you want translated. Computers do exactly what you ask them to do, not what you expect them to be able to do!