Bridging the Language Barrier in Search: Google Translate

Google Translate (Beta)

This is the other Google Language service that focuses more on translation. For those who don’t know, Google’s translation engine is well known to be very good. By utilizing a unique approach in solving translation problems, their language translation machine has been shown to perform better compared to other mainstream translation engines.

Google Translate is a more recent effort by the company to streamline its translation service and put it out as a separate service, along with the addition of two interesting tools: Search results and a Dictionary.

Google Translate’s UI is implemented in a typical, simplistic Google fashion: tabs separate the three main functionalities I mentioned above. The first tab for text and web page translation does exactly the same thing as the one found on the Language Tools page. Dictionary, the third tab is pretty self explanatory.

The Search Results tab in Google translate is the one that’s most interesting, primarily because it’s a translation solution whose use case idea is pretty simple and yet shows a lot of promise if executed properly.

The interface shows a search box, a drop down for the user’s language and another drop down that sets the language of web pages that the Google will search. What happens when you do a search is illustrated the following example:

1. Search for Dubai Tours, from English to Arabic
2. Google translates the query into its Arabic equivalent and searches relevant web pages that are written in Arabic
3. Google translates the Arabic web pages found by the search into English, then returns it to the user in a two columned result page, with the translated results on the left, and the results in its original language on the right.

This really is a good marriage of the translation tools, which collectively acts as an automatic translator when you’re looking for information. Soon you wouldn’t even worry about translation since Google can automatically present information to you in a language that you understand. And it’s important to emphasize here that Google will not only search web pages that’s specific to your language. It will search other pages in different language as well, and everything will be translated back to your preferred language.