Everyone’s favorite search-engine/social-networking multi-billion dollar corporation is at it again. Following the addition of several new features to the Gmail platform earlier this week, Google has also revamped certain portions of its language tools – in beta of course. It’s not available for all languages, nor is it in a place where most casual users would find it, but Google’s newest feature makes online translation of websites and documents a bit more enjoyable.
The trick is – use the Arabic. About a month ago, Google launched its brand-new (beta) English-to-Arabic and Arabic-to-English translation service, making it the first free online translation tool that actually gives decent results… of sorts. At any rate, that’s another story for another day; right now, it’s the (“Web 2.0”) technology we care about: Dynamic switching between source and destination languages on a translated webpage.
For instance, here’s our “WordPress-in-the-Name Issues” story from a couple of weeks ago in Arabic; it’s ideal because of it’s more “natural” language and glaring lack of code boxes, technospeak, and general all-around esoteric content. If you understand Arabic – ignore the grammar, it’s really bad. If you don’t, that’s ok, it doesn’t matter.