Let's take the word 'hello' which is 0110100001100101011011000110110001101111
To translate that back to characters we can use chr and int (with a base of 2) and some list slicing...
''.join(chr(int(bin_text[i:i+8], 2)) for i in xrange(0, len(bin_text), 8))
If we wanted to take 'hello' and convert it to binary we can use ord and string formatting...
''.join('{:08b}'.format(ord(c)) for c in 'hello')