With the Iran protests still going and social media platforms getting a lot of attention in the process Google has decided to add the Persian (Farsi) language to its Google Translate service. The company rushed the Persian language support because of the unfolding events in Iran so there may still be problems with the service.

“We feel that launching Persian is particularly important now, given ongoing events in Iran. Like YouTube and other services, Google Translate is one more tool that Persian speakers can use to communicate directly to the world, and vice versa — increasing everyone's access to information,” wrote Franz Och, principal scientist, on the Google blog. “As with all machine translation, it's not perfect yet. And we're launching this service quickly, so it may perform slowly at times. We'll keep a close watch and if it breaks, we'll restore service as quickly as we can.”

Social media tools, especially Twitter, have played a big role in the Iran protests by keeping the outside world informed or at least focused on the events. But with all the traditional and social media attention much of the reports have been conflicting and confusing so a tool like Google Translate may prove very useful in getting information in and out of the country. The Mountain View-based company warns that the translations are far from perfect and that currently the service is only optimized for English-Persian translations but it is working on adding support for all the 40 languages available in Google Translate.

“The web provides many new channels of communication that enable us to see events unfold in real-time around the world. We hope that Google Translate helps make all that information accessible to you — no matter what language you speak. So please visit Google Translate and try it out,” Och ended.