Several Google services to include automatic translation features

Mar 27, 2008 20:06 GMT  ·  By

What happens when you receive an email written in a different language than your native one or the ones you don't know too well? Well, it's simple: copy the text, go over to Google Translate or to any other translation website/service/application, paste the text, select your language and start the translation process. But what if you have such a translation feature straight in your email service? Supposing you're using Gmail, what if you're able to translate the message you have just received with a single click? Well, that would be something great, especially if you're one of those who usually communicate a lot by email.

Well, this is exactly what Google may introduce in the close future as Matt Glotzbach, Google's director of product management for Enterprise, said in an interview with Computerworld. Talking about such a function, the Google official explained that Google Apps, the free/paid suite of service provided by the Mountain View company, may offer it anytime soon.

"What you need for real-time automated machine translation is large amounts of compute power, which we have, and large amounts of data, which we have. Imagine a system that can do on-the-fly translation of things like e-mail, documents and IM chat. That's a feature of Google Apps you can see on the horizon," Matt Glotzbach explained in the interview with Computerworld.

Just imagine how useful this would be for an instant messaging client. Two users, from different corners of the world, chatting on Google Talk, and using their native languages. That would be something?

Although nobody knows for sure whether the Mountain View company will really implement such a function or not, this surely stimulates the competitors to prepare something similar, and who knows, maybe something even more powerful. Let's just hope that the other giants, Yahoo, Microsoft and others, think that a translation feature would be useful.