14 DAY TRIAL // Google News is making it easier to keep up with news, literally, from around the world. For international stories in particular, Google will start surfacing original sources as well and offer to translate them into English.
The new translation feature is only available for the US English version of Google News, but the idea could be expanded to any other language.
"To help bridge language barriers between you and the news of interest to you from around the world -- and to bring you more diverse perspectives on foreign events -- we’ve added a new 'translate' button to the expandable story boxes in the U.S. English edition of Google News," Yaroslav Kurovtsev, a software engineer working on Google Translate, wrote.
Obviously, the feature is powered by Google Translate, so Google didn't have much work to do to implement it, it just had to link up the two services.
In fact, it was probably more complicated to change the way stories are selected, to pick original ones in their native language, than it was to add the translation feature.
"Clicking the translate button reveals the English translation of the original headline using Google Translate," Google explained.
"Clicking on the headline takes you to the publisher’s website where you can choose to use Google Translate to see an English version of the entire article. Headlines are labeled with their country of origin," it added.
The feature will show up for international stories, the original title will be displayed and users will have the option of seeing a translation of it.
Having the ability to get a sense of how the press in the country affected views the issue should provide a much more accurate and less biased, depending on the place, view than just watching the analysis of journalists outside of the country.