Google Does Translations

Contributed by davak January 31, 2004  
Tagged: Google

Here’s how to use Google to translate your web page for you.

Google will cheerfully translate to and from most any language.

Easy Routine Google Stuff =—

If you do a routine search and get related search hits from different languages, google will offer you a link to translate that page automatically. For example, googling for “spanish music” yields several spanish language pages. Google gives you the option to translate these.
Hispanic Music – [ Translate this page ]

The more powerful way to use google translation can be found at Google’s language tools:
http://www.google.com/language_tools

From this page google will allow you to do several things:

1. Translate any entered text
2. Translate any particular URL
3. Search for pages within a certain country or in a certain language only
4. Set Your Default Language
5. See Google’s default page in multiple different languages

Manual Google Translations =—

If you really want to be crafty, you can use google’s language tools without going through the language tools page at all. I have underlined the important parts of the URL below:

[list]http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.tech-recipes.com&langpair=en%7Ces

The url above with have google translate www.tech-recipes.com into Spanish.

Although not functional, the symbolic url allows you to see which items to replace.

http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.anyurl.com&langpair=page’s original language%7Ctranslate language

Replace www.anyurl.com with the page to be translated.
Replace the page’s original language and the translate language with any of the appropriate language codes.

English = en
Spanish = es
German = de
French = fr
Italian = it
Portuguese = pt

A few combinations do not work. So if you want to translate Italian to Portuguese, you’ll have to wait a while.