Search in English and get results in French

May 24, 2007 07:39 GMT  ·  By

The Mountain View company Google introduced a major update for the Translate service that allows you to search the Internet in a certain language and get the results in another one. For example, you can type "Paris restaurant" in the search box and choose French for the results. Google will return you only French results along with an English translation. Yes, I know, it looks a little bit complicated but trust me, it isn't. Google gives a better explanation: "search for Dubai tours from English to Arabic; we translate your query into this language and find Arabic web page results; finally, we translate the Arabic web page results back into English for you".

"While machine translation is not perfect, it's usually good enough for you to obtain the gist of information in a language you might otherwise be unable to access. We think this feature will be particularly useful for our international users since although the majority of Internet users out there are non English speakers, a majority of the content on the Internet is still in English," Franz Och, Research Scientist; Maureen Heymans, Software Engineer; and Jeff Chin, International Product Manager, said today.

Google's Translate function is very useful for a lot of Internet users because there is a huge amount of information that is not available in the mother tongue. Some time ago, the search giant debuted a new feature for the translate function and available only to Chinese users. This particular feature allowed visitors to suggest a better translation for a certain word, helping other users and the company too to offer translations that are more correct.

Using today's update, Google makes an important step for the improvement of the search engine because the translation feature might be implemented into the main technology very soon. However, you should give it a try and see how useful it is.