Reading Papers in a Language you don't Speak First, I apologize if I'm posting this to the wrong place, but it seems correct.
My adviser sent me the SGA text of Grothendieck which is in French. Though I can piece together parts of the text, I'm afraid that I'm losing significant parts of the meaning when I just have no idea what a sentence says. Google Translate was not terribly helpful. I was wondering what the standard techniques are for dealing with papers in a foreign language.
 A: You can try to seek assistance in a translation site such as http://www.proz.com.
This is a global site connecting clients and translators from around the world. Although there are few professional translators who understand advanced mathematics, such creatures may exist if you seek translation from a common language like French.
You can register at the site and offer the job with all your conditions. Then you select the translator who suits you most. 
I would not expect a high-quality result, but you can help the translator by providing her/him with the terminology of the subject field.
The down side is that it can cost you several hundred $, depending on the length of the paper.
A: Swallow the frog. I did it. You know what it tasted good! 
I suggest you learn French, I did it and I am very happy about the result. Now I can read very easily French papers and books. Most importantly, I can see the difference between reading French papers word-by-word and reading when you know elements of French language. The main difficulty for understanding French texts is to figure out the correct meaning of articles, prepositions, pronouns, etc. You can't effectively understand a text without being acquainted with them. Therefore, you need to learn French at least at the intermediate level. Reading French papers using a dictionary (and without a basic acquaintance with the French language) is very difficult and often causes misunderstanding. 
If you intend to stay in mathematics for the rest of your life, soon or late you need to learn French. Sometimes the only reference for a subject is in French and without that particular reference you can't proceed your research. It happened to me almost every year, so I decided to learn French. 
I said in the above that the frog tasted good. By that I mean first I expected it to be horribly difficult, but after a while and using new softwares, not only it wasn't that hard, but also it was kind of fun. In fact after studying some serious mathematics, studying every other subject in the world seems easy and entertaining! 
Edit: For some dictionaries see my post here. 
A: When I met my adviser for the first time, he gave me some math papers to read. This was in 1971;
personal computers did not exist yet, not speaking of Google translate:-) We spoke in Russian with my adviser.
I proudly said that I can read English and French, but not German.  His reply was: "A mathematician has to read in all languages"! 
So I spent a summer learning some
basic German. However my German is still weak, and I feel this has a negative influence on my research. Two years later my advisor gave me a paper in Catalan...
Later I moved to the US, and I know several English speaking mathematicians
who learned Russian to read mathematics. But the ability to read in 3 principal languages
(English, German and French) was considered a norm in my generation for all mathematicians.
French is especially useful, because after you learn French, you can also read math papers
in Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Catalan, with a dictionary:-)
It is true, after 1980-s they are not writing math in German anymore, with rare exceptions. But so much interesting
math is already written in German! Very few books and almost no papers are translated into
English from German and French. And those translations which exist are usually very poor.
Recently I was discussing with my British colleague a translation of one classic Russian
book. He said that he does not really care, because he prefers to read math in the original language. He does not speak Russian and never took a course in it. But still he
prefers to read Russian math books in Russian.
