Google Talk Translation Bott

Google Talk launched two dozen of translation bots yesterday that you add to your Google Talk contact list and use them to translate between languages on the fly. For example, the translation bot de2en@bot.talk.google.com is German to English, and en2fr@bot.talk.google.com will translate English inputs into French. You can find a list of 24 language pairs that the bots support on Google Operating System.

Comparing to Google Translate, this feature is really wonderful when you need to translate a lot of vocabularies. The downside is that you will need to add a lot of these bots to your contact list if you need to translate between several languages. A better approach, in my opinion, is that they should identify the input languages, like this Language Identifier on Xerox’s website. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great, but there are always room for improvement.