As someone who teaches English on a regular basis, I am very cynical of machines that claim to do perfect translations. Languages are full of idioms, contexts and inflections and computers are simply not up to the standard yet of Star Trek’s “Universal Translator”. Give it the word “polish” and it will decide there’s a 50-50 chance that you either mean the stuff you use to clean your shoes or the nationality.

So when I read today that Google has introduced translation bots in Google Talk, I thought to myself “oh great, now all my students will do their translations with Google Talk!”. I decided to test out the feature for myself to see how accurate it was. So I loaded the German translation bot and had a conversation with it. My eventual conclusion - not bad. I expected worse but it could definately be much better. There’s definately room for improvement.

The translation is done by a Google machine called a bot so you would add the relevant bot to your contact list and type in what you want translated. The bot immediately translates it. You can then copy and paste the translated text over into the window where you are talking to the speaker of that language. OR another possibility is to utilise Google Talk’s Group Chat so the person sees you typing in English and the bot automatically translating it. If they have the bot on their contact list translating from their language back to yours, then all of a sudden you will find yourself having a conversation in two languages!

But as I said, the translations are not perfect. For example, it doesn’t like “Let’s” (Let us) or “I’m” (I am). Plus, if the word you are translating has several possible meanings then be prepared for the Google bot to take a random guess what one you mean.

But I suppose for basic conversations, the Google translation bots are not bad and definately a step in the right direction. But I’ll keep waiting for the universal translator!

To find the right bot to add to your contact list, consult this list to find the abbreviations for the languages you’re looking for. You would first type the language you are translating from, then add “2″ and then the language you want to translate to, followed at the end by “@bot.talk.google.com”. So for example, English is “en” and German is “de” - so if you wanted to translate from English to German, you would add to your GTalk contact list : en2de@bot.talk.google.com.