Mountain View, California — For those sites that uses Google Friend Connect and its comment widget, Google has just rolled out a novel new feature called: comment translation. With the gadget, users can now unify the language of any comment thread, translating any and all comments easily into their native language.
Once the comment widget plugged into Google Translate, enables readers to translate comments left in foreign languages. This means that if you have one post in Mandarin, another in Spanish, and yet another in Russian, you can click an option to read them all in the same language.
Within the gadget, there is a translate button in the lower left-hand corner. The way it functions is the comment widget has a “Translate” link which then pops up a menu of languages to choose from. Once you have selected your language, all comments that are not in this language will be translated and highlighted in yellow.However, there is a safe side as well if ever anything goes wrong, you always have the option to revert back to the original text if you wish to do so. Simply select “No Translation” from the same menu.
“The comments gadget is just one way Friend Connect can help web-masters foster deeper interactions between site members,” says Google Friend Connect Product Manager Mussie Shore.
Google says that this can function with a variety of sites, including international non-profits such as the World Wide Fund For Nature’s Earth Hour website. The Earth Hour campaign is supported by 4,000 cities in 88 different countries to help engage citizens in conserving energy. Visitors to this website can now leave comments in their native language and use Google Friend Connect’s comment translation to engage in discussions with the greater community.
Google is employing its own Translate API to carry out this task, which means whatever unintentionally bad translations it would do on the Translate site will happen on comment threads. Friend Connect users who already have the tool installed on their blogs or sites do not have to upgrade; Google is pushing out the new features with the same bit of code.
Comment translation is one of several new gadgets that have been rolled out in Google’s Friend Connect gallery, perhaps in an effort to catch up to Facebook Connect. These features include the event gadget, the polls gadget, and the Get Answers gadget.
However, if you do not have it on your site, and you wish to avail it, it is available at google.com/friendconnect. More information about this and other Google Friend Connect features is available at the features gallery.
This will be a boon to international blogs and sites, such as Go2Web20, which use Google Friend Connect as a login system.
Take a quick video tour here showing it works in action: