by Lauren Nemec
I know that Google has been offering a machine translation tool for translations of text and web pages, called “Google Translate”, though I’ve never used it and haven’t really been following the news about its advances or anything.
But today I stumbled upon a blog post at the “Google talkabout” blog discussing Google’s release of a machine translation robot, or “bot”, that translates text in “instant message” or “chat” online conversations. Anyone with a Gmail account can use this functionality.
It sounded so cool, I had to check it out.
The conversation started out well.. The robots translated the text well enough (not that greetings are difficult for MT software) and within seconds…
…But, it didn’t work flawlessly. Perhaps it was user error, but you can see in this next image that the “en2fr” robot jumped in with some weird text of its own before my “fr2en” robot had a chance to translate my pricing question. 
Regardless of the hiccup, I think this is a nifty tool that can be very helpful in overcoming language barriers- when the quality of the translation is not crucial. Things like this allow us to communicate with almost anyone, anytime, anywhere.
Anyway, these bots are available to Google chat users in 24 language pairs: ar2en, bg2en, de2en, de2fr, el2en, en2ar, en2de, en2el, en2es, en2fr, en2it, en2ja, en2ko, en2nl, en2ru, es2en, fi2en, fr2de, fr2en, hi2en, hr2en, it2en, ja2en, ko2en, nl2en, ru2en, uk2en, ur2en, zh2en. (Don’t understand the language codes? Look them up here.)
