Washington — If you are like most people fascinated by innovative technology, then guess what the official Google Reader blog just announced that Google is rolling out another ingenious project: A better Google Reader that automatically translates world wide feeds into your native language.
Google Reader is an online feed reader that allows you to subscribe to your favorite sites. So you can just go to http://reader.google.com, to collect all your news in one place.
Now you can have access to even more data about your favorite topics, because now Google Reader takes advantage of “Google Translate” technology to convert any feed to your preferred language. You can find feeds by looking for the orange RSS icon like the one at the bottom of our right-hand column.
With the integration of 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 is not published in a language that you can read.
To use the new offering, subscribe to any feed. Once subscribed, select “Translate into my language” from “Feed settings…” and the feed will be automatically translated to the best of Google’s ability, based on your default language preference.
An RSS feed can be set up using Google Reader, for example, to pull articles from a Turkish blog or website, and the content can be automatically translated into English or any of the other nearly 20 languages available.
The translations are done by machine using the Google Translate program.
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. Users will have to log out for the update to take place on your account.
This feature will surely derive extended impact 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.
While at first blush, this may seem to be a minor feature, it actually holds the potential to change the way people read feeds – and the feeds they choose to read. So now users do not have to worry over the just about “okay” and “fair enough” translations by Google Translations or perhaps the limited knowledge of languages!
This feature could help bridge the language gap online. And once we passionately start breaking down those language barriers and sharing ideas with more people, that may be a real step toward a truly World Wide Web.