AlaaShaker's Weblog

Translation: I’m cheating here!

I do know some French, but that doesn’t make me a translator. Guess what, you don’t need one anymore ..

Google brings you their new “Translator Bots” .. !!
All you need to do is add <en2fr@bot.talk.google.com>. This will add a new contact to your GoogleTalk contact list (I suggest renaming it to something reasonable like “English-to-French”). Then just send a message in English to the bot, and it will send u back the French translation .. et voila!

Google Translator Bots* support other languages as well. Add any contact with the format <[from language]2[to language] @bot.talk.google.com>, and the supported language pairs are: ar2en, de2en, de2fr, el2en, en2ar, en2de, en2el, en2es, en2fr, en2it, en2ja, en2ko, en2nl, en2ru, en2zh, es2en, fr2de, fr2en, it2en, ja2en, ko2en, nl2en, ru2en, and zh2en. They are name using the two-letter language abbreviations code.

The bots use GoogleTranslate as their back end, meaning that quite a few languages in rough beta, so this tool should mainly be used for casual or on-point word or line translations. Yet, it’s still awesome!

* Bots: also known as web-robots, are software applications that run automated tasks over the internet; such as acting as a chat contact.