14 DAY TRIAL // Google doesn't want to remain behind in the Internet race or any race at all on any front. It struggles to go head to head with Yahoo! about the mobile industry market penetration for delivering ads and seems to be up for a limping start, and the war with Microsoft is one that announces to rage on for quite a while. The Facebook deal just made the Mountain View giant mad and it now tries to bring back to speed its every domain that Microsoft seems to have an advantage in. Well except for the Google Operating System that no one seems to know anything about? as usual.
The latest clash between Google and the Redmond based Microsoft is not as famous as their previous one and it won't get the same media coverage by far: a translation widget for sites.
The one supplied by Microsoft has played the field for longer and it uses a translations system from Systran and offers 25 language pairs, as Ionut Alex Chitu mentions. It only works in Internet Explorer and it consists of a dropdown that includes the message "Translate this page" in the respective available languages. Google's widget, on the other hand, is a bit more home-made, a bit more friendly towards other browsers and offers a lot more quality to the translation. It is actually just a Google gadget loaded in an iframe that has a lot of branding around it, unlike its counterpart from Microsoft. Interestingly enough, the lack of branding often renders the adding of that widget useless, as many don't use it because they don't know what it does.
It's not perfect though, it has several problems regarding the adding of words that do not exist but the overall impression is that it does its job a lot better than Microsoft's widget does. More languages are expected to be added in the future and it looks like a tool likely to be used by default by many users.