GoogleTalk Auto Translation

Google Talk, Google's homemade Jabber-based chat client, is now host to 24 (and counting) new translation bots (a (ro)bot is a piece of software that acts as a chat contact and provides some functionality) that will take whatever text you typed and translate it to the appropriate language. Each of the bots was built with an open protocol called XMPP that lets anyone build their own bots and share them on the Google Talk network, as long as you've got some place to host them.

The new bots become particularly useful if you invite one into a group chat with one or more users who speak a different language. The bot will automatically translate the conversation so each user can understand one another, which you can see on the screenshot to the right. It's like having an interpreter sit beside you and translate whatever you say (as long as it can understand you. Mistyped words, slanks, and names will be spelled as is without interpretation. Although machine translation is still far from perfect, these bots can be helpful in bridging language barriers).

If you want to try it, just add en2zh@bot.talk.google.com as a friend in Google Talk and send it a message to translate from English to Chinese. You can use our embedded chatbox gadget from within this blog.

For more languages, just add any of the 23 other translation bots. They're named using two-letter language abbreviations as "[from language]2[to language]@bot.talk.google.com", and the supported language pairs are: ar2en, de2en, de2fr, el2en, en2ar, en2de, en2el, en2es, en2fr, en2it, en2ja, en2ko, en2nl, en2ru, en2zh, es2en, fr2de, fr2en, it2en, ja2en, ko2en, nl2en, ru2en, zh2en. So, for French to German translation, talk to fr2de@bot.talk.google.com.