Translation comes to Google Reader
By Dave Jeyes
Google is launching another project that started as an initiative drawn out by the company’s allocation of 20 percent of employees’ time to innovate. The feature automatically translates feeds added to Google Reader into your native tongue.
Google Reader is an online feed reader that lets you subscribe to your favorite sites. Then you can just go to http://reader.google.com to get all your news in one place. You can find feeds by looking for the orange RSS icon like the one at the bottom of our right-hand column.
With the addition of a translation feature, Google Reader has become even more useful. Since the Web is published in dozens of languages around the globe, you may be interested in reading a site that isn’t published in a language that you can read.
When you subscribe to feeds in other languages, Google Reader will now translate them into your primary language. Google’s translation services, while not perfect, can transcribe text between 35 different languages. For multilingual subscribers, you can turn off translation and read the site as it was published.
Google is rolling out this feature quietly and automatically to Google Reader users. You may need to log out for the update to take place on your account.
This feature will resonate well with gamers and mobile phone enthusiasts looking to follow the advanced products being released in Japan. Likewise a wine connoisseur could be drawn to reading about French wine from a blog published in the region.
This feature could help bridge the language gap online. If applied to email, Google users from around the world could connect with millions more people than they could otherwise interact with because of the language gap.
However, users will still have the challenge of discovering interesting content in other languages before subscribing to it. There are also the sometimes comical results of machine-translating colloquialisms, but that’s half the fun, right?
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