Google Offers Translation, Adds New Interface Languages

Google ( http://www.google.com/ ) has started offering machine translation of their search results. (Machine translation just means that the translation is done automatically, with a computer. Machine translation is nowhere near perfect, and should be relied on only to get the "gist" of a page you can't read.) 

This new feature, which is in beta, is integrated into Google in two ways. The first is in the search results. All search results in Spanish, German, French, and Portuguese will have a "translate this page" link beside them. Click on it and you'll get a translated page framed by Google. There's a link to a printable version as well.

(If you don't see a "translate this page" link on your result page, go back and check your preferences. If you have "Search only these selected languages" checked, and none of the languages are the ones named in the last paragraph, you won't see the "translate this page" link.) 

Google's integrated the translation directly into their search results. Check out the preferences page. You can now specify that you want titles and page summaries in Spanish, German, French and Portuguese translated directly on the results page... that's the theory, anyway. I tried it several times and it didn't work for me. You can read more about Google's translation options at http://www.google.com/machine_translation.html.

While we're talking about languages on Google I'll also mention that Google now has 30 language interface options, with the addition of Galician, Estonian, Greek, Irish, Polish, Tagalog, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Serbian. 

Posted to Search Engines-Google