Friday 25 May 2007

Google Translate expands its capabilities

Google has announced that it's added a new tool (still in Beta) to Google Translate that should help searchers to find results in other languages. Called a "cross-language search feature", you can get search results on foreign language web pages in your own language. This new feature is available in the following languages: English, Arabic, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese (Traditional), and Chinese (Simplified. On the search interface, you choose your native language and specify the language you would like to find results in. For example, if you want to find out about trademark law in France, you could enter "trademark law" in the english search box, select "french" for your results, and Google would give you french language pages about trademark law both in French and translated into English.
The translations are still very clunky, as they are for any machine translation system; and the feature currently seems geared towards travellers and businesspeople, but it's bound to improve.

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