Google adds automatic translation to Gmail

BANGALORE, INDIA: Not only Arabic or Chinese, Gmail can now enable the translation of 41 different languages.

The major Internet search engine is all set to revamp its Gmail by adding more and more new features to its Gmail. After announcing the roll out of a out a new migration tool that makes it easier for users to export e-mail messages and contacts from other e-mail services, on Tuesday it has integrated its automatic translation technology directly into Gmail.

The objective behind enabling this technology for the Gmail users is to provide them with effective mode of communication that helps in understanding of multiple languages.

Developed in 2006 this technology helps in translation of distinct and complicated languages.

According to the official Google Blog, this tool applies statistical learning techniques to build a translation model.

“Most state-of-the-art commercial machine translation systems in use today have been developed using a rules-based approach and require a lot of work by linguists to define vocabularies and grammars,” said the blog.

It added that several research systems, including their, take a different approach: they feed the computer with billions of words of text, both monolingual text in the target language, and aligned text consisting of examples of human translations between the languages.

To start up with this technique, Gmail users have to enable the message translation from the 'Labs' tab under 'Settings'

Languages that may be translated include: Arabic, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Japanese, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Swedish. If the message that you get is in any of these languages, you may have it translated into any one of the other languages.

This feature is available to individual Gmail users, as well as to people who use it as part of the Apps collaboration and communication suite for organizations.