Online Translations At Your Fingertips

By Eric Leland, August 30, 2009
For years I have relied on machine translations online to help get the gist of sites and conversations in languages I cannot read. It was always a somewhat laborious process of cutting/pasting text, selecting languages, submitting web page urls, etc. It's great to see a lot of integration between these translation tools with the software where we actually write text.

I logged into my Google Docs account today, and discovered a small but very handy new Google translation integration. By clicking Tools - Translate Document, you can translate your document into one of 41 other languages instantly. It's still a machine translation, but its super helpful to simply be able to share a doc and allow others to get a reasonable understanding right away, without cutting/pasting into free translation tools.

These translation integrations to common writing tools are big timesavers. Another smart example of this is Tbot - the Microsoft Windows Messenger translations service. Your instant messages are instantly translated to the language specified for your recipients. Again, all the caveats of imperfect machine translations should be expected.

Gmail offers a service to translate emails automatically through an application in its Labs. In Gmail, just click Settings - Labs, then choose to enable "Message Translation". You can set your preferred language, and whenever an email appears that you cannot read (in a language supported by Google), you can click the new link above your email message "Translate message to", and read on.

Even Twitter has automatic translation tools. I have not yet tried any, but planning to get Twitter World for my iPhone to take a look. It is a Twitter iPhone client that promises to automatically translated tweets into my language. It has had a rocky spring and summer with some nasty bugs, but seems like a very useful service.

Any online translation tools you love? Let me know!

Comments

"Again, all the caveats of

by Tammi (not verified) - 2009-08-31 09:50

"Again, all the caveats of imperfect machine translations should be expected."

Indeed. To gain a simple understanding of straight-forward, technical documents, Google Translate *is* a time-saving, useful tool.

For communication-grade translation -- where the recipient's understanding is very important and understanding the cultural nuances of language is important (which I would assert is *much* of what's produced by nonprofits and businesses), machine translation is simply not there yet. Idioms, slogans, slang, heck even casual internet chat -- you cannot trust that MT will produce the language of a native speaker.

I work for a translation agency. I am also an American living abroad in Germany. I also use Google Translate for personally communicating with the few friends who speak no English here. Whenever I use Google Translate, I pass it by my German friends, just like when they have something important they want to communicate in English, they pass it by me.