New in GMail Labs: Translate this!
Posted on 20 May 2009, at 4:43 am, by Federico Cervelli
Here is another welcome new Gmail Labs feature: “Message translation“.
Activate it in the settings of your Gmail account and you will able to translate the message to your own language.
Once enabled the feature, a translation option will appear when you read messages. You will also able to change the language to translate to, choosing the “Change language” link.
Here is an italian text message…
… and here is its translation.
The new feature will also add new choices in the “Language” section of the “General” pane of your Gmail “Settings”. From here you will able e.g. to select a different language to translate to and to enable transliteration.
This is a handy tool, and I look forward to translate all the strange spam messages I receive to see what they are offering 
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May 20th, 2009 at 4:44 am
Nice! I actually just translated something (spam naturally) and it worked perfectly. How cool. Could this eventually overcome language barriers altogether?
May 20th, 2009 at 5:03 am
Since I activated this feature, I have received no more spam… maybe it works as a better filter, too?
May 20th, 2009 at 5:33 am
It’s Okay as long you use it to translate SPAM. Don’t dare to use it to translate serious materials, since you might find yourself in bizarre situations in front of your clients… There are good services nowadays for fast translations – made by human translators (such as myself!). One I recommend (and belong to) is OneHourTranslation. When you translate emails there you can be sure you get good quality results to work with.
May 20th, 2009 at 6:27 am
Nassim,
thank you for your observation.
As a matter of fact also the Gmail Blog guys themselves say that:
“It’s not quite the universal translators we’re so fond of from science fiction, but thanks to Google Translate, it’s an exciting step in the right direction.”
A free and handy service like this could help having the “taste” of the conversation, and not (for now…) to write to your over-ocean boss