Automatic translations in Google Talk

image Meeting new people and chatting with them on Google Talk can be a very enriching experience. The problem comes when that person and you don’t speak the same language and the communication flow is frequently interrupted by vocabulary lapses and constant dictionary look-ups. Google became aware of this issue and decided to solve it in a really handy way: by enabling a bunch of bots that automatically translate any text you type in into the target language.

The translating bots in Google Talk work in a very simple way. You only have to select the ones you’re interested in from the bot list and add them to your Google Talk contact list, as if they were just another friend. There are quite a few combinations to choose from, and the email address you have to use to add them always follows the same pattern: [source language]2[target language]@bot.talk.google.com. Thus a bot that translates from English to German would be en2de@bot.talk.google.com, one that translates from Spanish to English would be es2en@bot.talk.google.com and soon.

Bot List

Languages Bots Bots
Arabic - English ar2en en2ar
Bulgarian - English bg2en en2bg
Czech - English cs2en en2cs
Danish - English da2en en2da
German - English de2en en2de
German - French de2fr fr2de
Greek - English el2en en2el
Spanish - English es2en en2es
Finnish - English fi2en en2fi
French - English fr2en en2fr
Hindi - English hi2en en2hi
Croatian - English hr2en en2hr
Italian - English it2en en2it
Japanese - English ja2en en2ja
Korean - English ko2en en2ko
Dutch - English nl2en en2nl
Norwegian - English no2en en2no
Polish - English pl2en en2pl
Portuguese- English pt2en en2pt
Romanian - English ro2en en2ro
Russian - English ru2en en2ru
Swedish - English sv2en en2sv
Chinese - English zh2en en2zh
Traditional Chinese - English zh-hant2en en2zh-hant
Traditional Chinese - Chinese zh-hant2zh zh2zh-hant

* don't forget to add @bot.talk.google.com.

Once you’ve added a bot, open a chat with it and type in the sentence you want to translate. The bot will reply with the translation, ready for you to copy on your friend’s chat window. Needless to say, you can use these automatic translations for multiple purposes: from being able to communicate in several languages to playing a joke on a friend or – only for the most cheesy ones – saying “I love you” in a dozen different languages.

 
Copyright 2008 IToxy