Google and Its Language Tools

One of the things I admire with Google is their effort to localize their websites. It dates back to 2001 when they started the “Google in Your Language” project. This project has encouraged thousands of volunteers from different countries to translate Google pages into their native languages. Because of their conscientious effort Google is now available in more than 100 languages.

Google in Your Language project wasn’t an easy task but Google is serious in reaching all markets worldwide and perfect their international approach to search. There’s notable efforts from Google to reach the Arabic speakers, the South Koreans, the Chinese, the Indians, the Russians, the Brazilians, the New Zealand People, and the Japanese users. This is to ensure that everyone has access to each Google product and tool.

Aside from Google in different languages, they also offer this machine-translation service for free. The service is called Google Translate which so far can translate between 34 languages and is user-friendly. Google Translate can be accessed in the product main page or in Google Language Tools.

What the user just needs to do when he has seen a foreign text in one of the websites he is visiting and he’s curious to know what it means, is copy the foreign text and paste it in the Google Translate box. He’ll then select the language of the original text in the box and choose what language it will be translated to, say English, in the second box. Then he’ll click the translate button. The translated text will appear on the left column. A sample of translated text in Google Translate which is very accurate

Users can also ask Google to translate a webpage by just pasting the URL of that page. And choose from what language to what language it will be translated.

Another cool thing in the Google Translate page is that this page is not limited to perform text or web translations. It can also do Translated Search, where two types of search results appear on the same page. (Left column has search results for the original language, while the right has translated search results.) It also has a Dictionary in different languages and translation, a gadget that users can embed in their websites to offer their visitors option for translation, and the Google Toolbar which users can customized in any of the 34 languages supported.

Conclusion:

Google Language Tools just proves how Google helps improve the Web by giving everyone’s access to it through translating languages. It is arguable though if Google has a hidden agenda on doing this translating effort. Are they sincere on breaking the language barrier? Or do they just want to increase their search market and earn more from it. What do you think?