Thursday, August 27, 2009 8:51 AM
(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)My cousin is in first grade and sometimes she writes short stories for class. I try to share the stories with her grandparents, but because Japanese is their first language and they don't speak English very well, it's been tough. Today we're releasing a feature for Google Docs to make this kind of multi-lingual sharing easier — you can now automatically translate documents into 42 different languages.
So for my cousin's latest story, I helped her type it up in Google Docs and then clicked "Translate document" from the "Tools" menu. In a matter of seconds, Google Docs has translated the whole story into Japanese using Google Translate's technology.
You can replace the original document with the translation or make a new translated version. I like keeping an English version for friends here and creating a separate Japanese version for her grandparents. All the formatting and layout is preserved no matter what language it's in — translations aren't perfect, but we are continuously working on improving translation quality over time. We hope this new feature helps you more easily share information without worrying about language barriers.
8 comments:
Great feature, my french speaking students will like this.
But when ommission of Latvian from list of spellchecking languages will be rectified? There is Lithuaniaa and Estonian spellchecking, and Google does have Latvian spellchecking, but somehow it is lacking in Google Docs..
Excuse for my bad english.
* Maybe it's possible to add a tooltip that see the original version of text for do correction easly.
It would have been so nice if users would have been allowed to translate sections of their text instead of the entire document. :(
I agree with ahab - this is a super feature but it would be great to be able to highlight only part of a doc to translate.
If you can extend this into a professional translating application complete with Translation Memory and the ability to correct the translation sentence by sentence, that would be fantastic.
Umm guys this feature is broken.
"We're sorry, we've encountered an error translating your document. We apologize for the inconvenience. An untranslated version of the document appears below."
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