When covering netbook-related news, I use Google Translate most of the times. Although I don’t really see myself using the service to translate Afrikaans, Belarusian, Icelandic, Irish, Macedonian, Malay, Swahili, Welsh and Yiddish, some of you might find yourself at one point in time, needing to translate texts in those languages and so Google has added them to the languages supported by Google Translate.With these new languages, the number of international languages being supported by Google now totals to 51. This is also equivalent to 2550 language pairs and include all 23 languages used in the EU countries.
As these new languages are fairly new in Google Translate, expect to encounter rough translations along the way. But Google promises that the translation will improve over time. Well, anyway, up until now even the other foreign languages suffer the same so don’t really expect too much from the translations. It’s good enough to understand the gist of what the texts written in foreign language is trying to say.
What’s good about Google Translate right now is that Google is starting to integrate the service to its various web products including Gmail, RSS feeds in Google Reader, documents in Google Docs, and more to follow soon. It’s a lot better than going to http://translate.google.com and then pasting the text that you want to translate.
