There are plenty of free translation sources available on the Web and
Google Talk offers an additional one that many people may like when they chat with friends or clients overseas. Google Talk uses Chat Bots which are translation bots, a piece of software that acts as a chat contact and
translates words or sentences in real-time.
In the picture you see, as soon as you type words that need to be translated, the Chat Bots translates and sends an instant message. Gmail also has Google Talk built-in, so we don't need a separate desktop application to use this feature.
To do this, you have to add Chat Bot as a contact in Google Talk. In the picture above, which uses Spanish translation, one needs to add
en2es@bot.talk.google.com, where the first part “en2es” refers to “English to Spanish”.
Google uses these abbreviations based on
ISO codes.
You can use this as a foreign language interpreter in chat discussions or as a pocket translator to translate words. This feature can be used on mobiles like
Blackberry as well. This may come in handy when you want to find a quick translation.
In total Google has the following combinations you can choose to translate (just add the bot.talk.google.com, after these abbreviations:
• ar2en (Arabic to English)
• de2en (German to English)
• de2fr (German to French)
• el2en (Greek to English)
• en2ar (English to Arabic)
• en2de (English to German)
• en2el (English to Greek)
• en2es (English to Spanish)
• en2fr (English to French),
• en2it (English to Italian)
• en2ja (English to Japanese)
• en2ko (English to Korean)
• en2nl (English to Dutch)
• en2ru (English to Russian)
• en2zh (English to Chinese)
• es2en (Spanish to English)
• fr2de (French to German)
• fr2en (French to English)
• it2en (Italian to English)
• ja2en (Japanese to English)
• ko2en (Korean to English),
• nl2en (Dutch to English),
• ru2en (Russian to English)
• zh2en (Chinese to English)
Other languages will be added soon.
The next step for Google is to use this machine translation and instant messaging feature to convert words to speech with AxsJax (Access Enabling Ajax language). This will help visually impaired users hear words as they are translated in Google Chat.
