San Francisco — Google’s making sure that Chrome’s dominance is a global phenomenon, using a uniquely Google trick: The Mountain View company on Tuesday said that automatic translation is the most latest feature it added to Google’s Chrome browser, allowing for instant machine translation of webpages, without the need for any browser extensions or plug-ins. Also new are privacy settings which may be implemented on a site-by-site basis.
Google, while announcing the tweaked version of the new beta Chrome 4, says that the Web is an “amazingly multilingual place,” and the browser will prompt the user when the language of the webpage viewed is different from their desired language setting, and offers to translate using Google Translate.
“Chrome will display a prompt asking if you would like the page to be translated for you using Google Translate,” Wieland Holfelder, engineering director at Google Munich, wrote in a blog post.
The concept is to “render all the world’s information universally acceptable in an easy, frictionless way,” he wrote.
The update is particularly interesting for people who often find themselves browsing to foreign-language sites for work as well as to business users who need to keep up with international partners or competitors.
The Chrome translation feature does not require any additional software. An “affirmative” answer translates the entire webpage into a single language, almost effortlessly, à la the Babelfish. Sure, there are still odd artifacts in the translation, as Google is keen to point out, but these will be chipped away at as Google’s tech advances.
Hence embedding Google’s machine-translation capability right into Chrome is something of a genius move. The system, as explained in Google’s promo video below, auto-detects if a page you have browsed to is in a different language to the default one you have got in Chrome’s settings, and it then offers to automatically translate the text for you.
Well, There are around 7,000 languages in the World so that is really not much of a surprise. However, Google Translate currently supports 52 languages, from Afrikaans to Yiddish. While Google acknowledges that its machine-based translation is not perfect as yet, it generally results in a translation good enough for the reader to understand the content being presented.
The new beta version works with Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7, despite some confusion because Google did not list Windows 7 as a supported operating system on an early version of the download page. (The new beta is Chrome version 4.1.249.1021.)
Google has also added a new “Privacy” section of Chrome’s options dialog. The new privacy options, meanwhile, ameliorates users’ control over their browsing experience. Users can now manage how cookies, images, JavaScript, plug-ins, and pop-ups are handled on a site-by-site basis. Want to allow cookies for one Web site, but not another? No problem.
The new features are available via the Chrome beta release. Those already running the beta channel will be updated automatically, and those on the stable version will be updated in the coming weeks.
While this will likely be overkill for most users, it increases the granularity of Chrome privacy options. All in all, this is a strangely timely set of moves by Google in the big-money Browser Wars.