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.
Best Answer
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.