Google: talkabout it in 20 Languages

Globalization is the way to go nowadays and everybody seems to be aware of that. At the top of the list striving to achieve that is trend setter and market sweeper Google, which just today added support for 20 new languages for its Google Talk.

The new languages added are Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Danish, Dutch, English (UK), Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish and Vietnamese. That is if you arrange them alphabetically. Geographically we note that out of the 20 languages, 11 or 13 are European languages (the difference is because of Turkey and Russia which are both in Europe and in Asia). Is it a consequence that the Google Webmaster Group added last week 20 European members, each speaking at least two languages? I don't know but it just might be. After all, that's why it's called support.

The Google Talk Gadget is easily accessible through the Google Talk homepage where one should select his or her language in the drop down menu in the top right and click on the "launch Google Talk Gadget" link. That or the adding of the gadget to one's iGoogle homepage. It's one's choice (how formal that sounds�).

The Google talk-about blog that presented the new addition also asked, as it usually happens in these situations, for user feedback and comments.

Google Talk was first released as a beta version on the 24th of August, 2005 and is a Windows application for Voice over IP (VOIP) and instant messaging released by Google as a response to the programs on the market at that moment, Yahoo!'s IM and Window's MSN Chat (renamed in the meanwhile to Windows Live Messenger). The Google Talk client was available only for Windows, but the launch of the gadget made it possible for all Adobe Flash Player supporting platforms to use it.