Some friends at Google sent word to me about a cool new feature in Google Talk. Basically, Google Talk now supports in chat translation via chat bots. Details about how these bots function are posted on the Google Talk blog: Link
Basically, to sum it up… these chat bots can be invited to into a group chat. Once invited, they then act as translators for the conversation that is occurring. Or, you can also just have them translate things for you through a one-on-one conversation with the bot via GTalk.
To use these bots, you will need to add them as friends to your GTalk contact list. All bots are named “[from language]2[to language]@bot.talk.google.com”. Currently the supported language pairs (24 of them) are: ar2en, de2en, de2fr, el2en, en2ar, en2de, en2el, en2es, en2fr, en2it, en2ja, en2ko, en2nl, en2ru, en2zh, es2en, fr2de, fr2en, it2en, ja2en, ko2en, nl2en, ru2en, zh2en. Each two letter country code is from the ISO 639-2 standard which is located here: Link
So far I’ve only played with the en2ja (English to Japanese) bot. Per people that are Japanese (friends and family) the translation sometimes seems a little strange. But, considering that it is a bot, Gogole made a disclaimer about this, and it does the job at providing some form of translation during a chat session. I will let that slip… Enjoy!
