You can write e-mails in your language and have it delivered to a friend or colleague’s e-mail box in any language of their choice.
Since the advent of the Internet and globalisation, many of us have made and met friends, co-workers and business partners around the world who have trouble reading English? Like the Asians. On the other hand, many speak French, Spanish, or Chinese, but have to deal with sending e-mail constantly to people who only speak English and no second language. Well for both categories Google’s forthcoming Automatic Message Translation for Gmail may be just enough to meet you need.
The Gmail feature “Automatic Message/Email Translation” had been in development since 2009. At the time, Google engineers were not quite sure how it was going to be used.
Google Translate Product Manager, Jeff Chin, stated that “We heard immediately from Google Apps for Business users that this was a killer feature for working with local teams across the world. Some people just wanted to easily read newsletters from abroad.
Another person wrote in telling us how he set up his mom’s Gmail to translate everything into her native language, thus saving countless explanatory phone calls (he thanked us profusely). I continue to use it to participate in discussions with the global Google offices I often visit.”
It turned out that message translation was very popular indeed, so Chin continued on, “We decided it was time to graduate from Gmail Labs and move into the real world. Over the next few days, everyone who uses Gmail will be getting the convenience of translation added to their email. The next time you receive a message in a language other than your own, just click on Translate message in the header at the top of the message, and it will be instantly translated into your language.”
We cannot say it is a perfect translation? Anyone who uses the Google Translate service on foreign-language Websites like russian or spanish or even documents written in these languages knows that while as machine translation programs go Google Translate is good, but it’s still not nearly as good as a fluent human translator with lots of experience.
You may say you are bilingual and you don’t need a translation for say Spanish. No problem. The Automatic Message Translation feature will let you turn off the translation function for the language you are fluent in. On the other hand, if you don’t speak a word of French but you have colleagues in Paris, you can set Gmail to always translate your French messages.
It’s not clear yet what languages Google will support with Automatic Message Translation. As of 2009, Google Translate supported 41 languages. These include such common languages as English, French, and German.
Google recently launched an online version of the translation system for Arabic-English and English-Arabic. Arabic is a very challenging language to translate to and from: it requires long-distance reordering of words and has a very rich morphology.It also includes important, but not that well known in the West languages as Chinese, and Russian. And, such obscure, but vital to their native speakers, languages as Basque, Welsh, and Yiddish.
While I wouldn’t rely on Automatic Message Translation for vital business messages, for day-in and day-out e-mails, I expect many people will find this service to be invaluable.
