Babel Redux

Google Translate is another one of these developments that Google seems to roll-out, for free no less, and no one seems to blink an eye. To me, it is further proof of not being evil. It makes Yahoo babelfish look like some sort of throwback translation algorithm in the eighties. The translations seem very accurate, at least the English translations of the Dutch things I have looked are coherent and require little additional decoding and it is tightly integrated with Chrome.

I had been using this a little since Google introduced it, usually for work assignments to research competitors or learn information posted by partners for marketing purposes. Now that I am living in Holland, it has become critical daily tool. Even one of those things that you wonder how you could live without it.

The translation box "instantly" translates (duh!) the words as you type them and is Google-ized, meaning it is clutter-free. It also will try to auto-detect the language you are typing (very cool). There is a robotic pronunciation which I don't find very helpful, but usually entertaining. You can also copy and paste multiple lines and it will keep it nicely separated (babelfish made it hard to do this before)

Not only does Translate provide a copy and paste box web-page, but in Chrome, it automatically translates pages as you surf them. Once it sees you are translating a lot of pages into a certain language (e.g. Dutch), it automatically starts translating without even asking you. Of course, you can turn it off. Equally helpful is the mouse-overs/tooltips/hovers contain the original text, so that you can see what words it is translating, in case there is confusion or you want to learn the word in the original language.

The browser translation is not perfect by any means. For example, when I am looking at sites in Dutch, like marktplaats.nl (local equivalent of craigslist), it will not translate all of the frames or the picklists, yet. Still, it is a leap above what we had before, and will help homogenize the world, for better or worse.