You may know it or not, but Google has been running a service for quite some time now which translates any text and sentences you feed it. That service is called “Google Translate”.
The power of Google Translate is now coming to your inbox. You can integrate Google Translate by paying a visit to the Gmail Labs. Enabling this feature allows you to translate e-mails written in a foreign language with a single click of your mouse button. The feature will first detect the foreign language. It will then translate the e-mail to the language you selected in your Gmail account settings, which is almost always your own native language.
You can activate this feature by navigating to the settings of your Gmail account. Afterwards, click on the ‘Labs’ tab. You will get to see a huge list of Gmail Labs features. Search the translation feature, enable it by checking the check-box, and save your settings. Tada! You can now translate e-mails with one single click of your mouse button.
To test the new feature, fire up an e-mail written in a foreign language. You will get to see a new button on top of the e-mail, saying ‘Translate this message to English’, or another language, depending on the language you have been choosing for your Gmail account.
Of course, the translation results aren’t always that perfect, since the result is coming from a computer translating the e-mail message. But most of the time, you can understand enough to get a rough sketch of what the user is talking about.
May 21st, 2009 at 3:58 pm
Thanks for that, Kevoows.
June 13th, 2009 at 6:21 am
Wow that’s a feature i did not know about!
June 19th, 2009 at 8:04 pm
I have gmail but I don’t know how to down load and get this program to work for me. Help. Thank you
June 23rd, 2009 at 4:06 pm
Didn’t know, but now I do! Thanks for the helpful info- gmail is really handy to have.
-Fresh Writing