Mountain View, California — Facing a continuous outage and breakdown for many of its popular services lately, the search engine behemoth Google has once again arrested the attention of its user. The Mountain View, California-based Internet leader on Tuesday said it had integrated its one-click automatic translation of messages for Gmail in 41 languages, allowing Gmail users to read e-mails in languages such as Turkish, Thai and Estonian.
Google has recently launched a number of new features for its Google Apps and Gmail aimed at making those services more sturdy for the enterprise, in addition to increasing their consumer user base.
Google already provides Google Translate service to carry-out automatic translations of entire Web pages or blogs. But, now Translation is creeping into more Google services this month, having just been added to Gmail’s labs.
“If you receive an email message in a different language, Gmail will help you translate it into a language you can understand,” Google said in a post on the company blog.
There is a new link that will show up in the top of the message that would allow you to translate you message into whatever language you have Gmail set to. You can also set it up to do the translation to any language of your choice.
Gmail users can now take advantage of translation right from their e-mails with a new Gmail labs add-on. (Credit: CNET)
It does the actual translation in just a few seconds, and displays both the subject and body while retaining the original. However, once your email message has been translated they do not remain translated, which means you will have to re-translate every time you are viewing that message again.
The feature can be set off by selecting the “Settings Tab” within Gmail, followed by the Labs tab. Once in Google Labs, enable “Message Translation”. And those running Premier and Education Editions of Google Apps will need to enable “Gmail Labs” from within the admin control panel before proceeding.
“If your entire company uses Gmail, e-mail communications between people in your company can take place in the language that is most comfortable for them,” Jeff Chin, product manager for Google Translate, wrote in a May 19 corporate blog post. “Each person can write messages in their native language and the recipients can translate the messages into their respective native languages.”
Chin warned, however, that machine translation still contains flaws.
“It can be quite helpful in providing the quick gist of a message, especially if you receive a lot of e-mails that are not in your native language,” he wrote. “If the translation is awkward or not quite right, you can quickly return to the original message by clicking ‘View original message‘ link.”
In another Gmail news, Gmail for mobile has unveiled some new features. Yesterday, the company rolled out the addition of colored labels. Regular Gmail users have enjoyed these for a while, but mobile has been a different story. A post on the Google Mobile blog promises more to come.