Gmail Labs Automatically Translates Your Email

I'd like it to go both ways - not just in, but outbound email as well.

YES! Now I can translate British to American when I win the British lottery!

cattrain

It translated my mom's Brazilian Portuguese pretty well (probably about 90% accurate). Pretty nice.

That being said, I'd probably delete any e-mail that was in a language that I didn't speak...unless it was a Nigerian prince with an excellent money-making opportunity!

@Intelext: That's why it's used to get the gist of the message.
I don't understand why people try to discredit a useful feature by listing specific instances in which it won't work. I mean, what's the alternative if you have an email from someone in a different language? I personally can't read and write every language on the face of the earth, and think that this, in fact, does have a point.

If only it were accurate for East Asian languages. :( "The ignition of solstice is to the do warm air monthly hiking."

SudeepaLaelap

Not a bad feature to be honest, i really don't see the point of it though. Google translation isn't that good and commonly mixes up word, so while you might be trying to say one thing, it might come out as another.

Intelext

@paintbox: Blah! Damn and blast!!! :( I meant....the importance OF bible study...... F*k me and my hurry to post something.

paintbox

a tip from the "well dah" department: Write in good English. Slang and idiom and lingo can screw things up. Keep it as simple and as grammatically correct as possible. It does help. I carried on a reasonably good conversation with a dude from France while we were sharing files......... I mean, while we were discussing world affairs and the evils of pirating and the importance Bible study.

paintbox

Not necessarily so. There is a million situations where I think this can be useful. @abhiroop:

PEDROJ

It goes both ways... you can translate the draft then send it. The feature works well for some languages. It is really useful for me, since those of my employees who do not speak English can get a hint of certain email exchanges.

@TheBusDriver:

PEDROJ

Don't really see the point of this. I mean I'd imagine that if someone sent you a mail in another language you would understand that language.

Now, i can use Hindi words or sentence in my English email!

Ravi Karandeekar

I'm thinking they'll never offer outbound email on-the-fly translation for legal reasons.

Certainly for the better.@TheBusDriver:

Now I can read all about all those exciting investment opportunities in my spam folder!

mahalie

Is it really "automatic" if you have to click the button to make it happen?

MarlandSaturninus

@abhiroop:

Or what if you're in the process of learning that language?

Wow, GMail just keeps on getting better!

RT
www.whos-watching.se.tc

Spammy Jones

I think its nifty - results can vary from time to time but more often than not Google Translate can provide enough hints for you to piece it together yourself.

And now, you can just dropbox anything you want translated to your gmail account and press a button, filter to a certain folder, everything saved etc. etc. :)

PWN

@PEDROJ:

These points are certainly valid, but I think this is more of a novelty. I mean the really useful thing for me would be the ability to talk to clients from around the world who don't speak English. However, I'd rather use a translator than a computer generated translation (which inevitably will be flawed). It would require the speech to be perfect. I guess it is useful, but not for me.

@abhiroop: I'm Brazilian and thus speak Portuguese. I've also learned English, as you can see. I don't speak German, but I have (old) technophobic German-speaking relatives around here, as well as relatives in Germany who don't speak anything but German. Guess whose e-mail address both sides use to exchange messages among themselves?

In addition, now that I'm not going to receive anymore questions from Portuguese-speaking-only coworkers in my business inbox asking whether this or that e-mail (usually spam) is important, my job will certainly become easier. Not by much, but anything is better than nothing. ;)

For those who think this is completely useless, I'm learning french, and in the process of trying to better my conversation skills in french, I made a couple of french 'pen pals', who regularly send me mails in french, and I try to reply in french as well as possible. I know mine is a far out case, but I'm sure theres others who have business with people using other languages, or are more comfortable in English but must talk to relatives in their mother tongue.

skorned

This will actually work out well for me as I work in the Caribbean and our Regional office covers Latin America and the Caribbean and they often send us updates and emails in Spanish and then hours after remember us Ingles speakers and send us the same email in English.
Off to try it now, maybe i'll find out that I missed some important deadline:)

guyfromtrinidad

I wish Googlemail would concentrate in important things like being able to turn off Message Threading instead of useless additions like this.

Mark.

Mark Palmos

There is a company in China with the same name as me. My domain is [mycompanyname].com. Their web site is [mycompanyname].com.cn.

I occasionally get emails mistakenly sent to bob@[mycompanyname].com rather than the .cn address. I politely forward them on using Google translate, and "Bob" replies in chinese. This should save me a few minutes of translating when forwarding to Bob. :)

Sean Nelson

Here is another mini language application using google apis: [www.nukedesigners.com.]
It lets you search and find feeds and translate it to quite a few languages.Thanks !

Avi Avia