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Translation Notes
In my first pass through Wanderung I tried to produce the maximum amount of English with the minimum use of a dictionary. When later passes required more and more dictionary references I found the Langenscheidt New College Dictionary very helpful.
When I returned to the project a few years after the initial work the effort of using the printed dictionary began to exceed its usefulness. Fortunately in the intervening years I had discovered the leo forums and online dictionary in my daily reading and found it very useful, especially their browser toolbars.
Many of the references to people or events would have remained a mystery without German language wikipedia, a trove of obscure information that would be tedious, or impossible, to find elsewhere.
Google sometimes turned up a dictionary page with the word I was seeking, and when it didn't do that the little blurbs that came with with each hit gave examples of its usage, sometimes a synonym, or maybe just allowed a good guess. For food items I got recipes. Then there were the pictures and maps . . .
The Free Dictionary translates between English and 11 other languages.
The dialektwörter site has useful glossary for Swiss dialect. You can find a bärndeutsch lexicon here.
This page has a long list of these and many other dictionaries, glossaries, and grammars.
I have left some German and much of the French and Italian untranslated, when I thought they were easy for most English speakers to understand. This would give the flavor of a conversation with someone who grew up in a bilingual town in a multilingual country.