Google Talk Is Your Personal Language Translation Assistant

Google has integrated their translation tools into Google Talk application through chat bots. These chat bots can translate text of one language to another language and works as your personal language translation assistants.

For instance, to have a line translated from English to French, invite en2fr@bot.talk.google.com to chat and then simply chat the line you want to see translated. Here are the few lines of chat conversation which I had with the bot to get English sentences translated to French.

The translation bots use Google Translate as their back end and this feature comes very handy when you want to chat with someone in their native language.

According to Google there are 24 bots currently available: ar2en, de2en, de2fr, el2en, en2ar, en2de, en2el, en2es, en2fr, en2it, en2ja, en2ko, en2nl, en2ru, en2zh, es2en, fr2de, fr2en, it2en, ja2en, ko2en, nl2en, ru2en, zh2en.

While machine translation is not perfect, these bots can be helpful in bridging the language barriers but advised not to use for official communication.