How to translate emails with Gmail

16 August 2009 · 2 comments

Translate foreign language emails with a Google Labs feature in Gmail.

A message in a Cyrillic script. Gmail recently added Translate to their Labs features. Now I can instantly translate foreign language emails and see what people are saying.

Unfortunately the translation usually just confirms my suspicion that I’m being spammed or scammed, but it’s good to actually know that and not simply suspect it.

I use Gmail through the web interface, largely because of all the extra features, such as this one.

Translate messages

The translate options. To translate messages within Gmail:

  1. Go to the Labs section of Gmail Settings and ensure Message translation is enabled, then Save the updated Settings.
  2. Open a message in a supported foreign language. At the time of writing around 40 languages seem to be supported.
  3. Click on the downward pointing arrow beside the Reply button at the top right of the message. A drop-down menu appears.
  4. Select Translate Message from that menu. A grey bar appears at the top of the message, with various translation options.
  5. Choose languages to translate from and to or just use the Detect language default, then click the Translate message link at the left end of the grey bar.
  6. Google translates the message and displays the translation in place of the original.

A translated message.

As always with machine translations they aren’t necessarily very fluent or even accurate. However, in my experience the results are sufficient for me to gain a good idea of what the correspondent was aiming to say.

In the screenshots attached to this post a commenter had left a message on a blog post at Run Spot Run. These particular comments added no value to the post and were probably intended just to add links to their site. I deleted the comments.

2 comments

Tagged as: Gmail, Google, Language, translate

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Note: there may be a delay before your comment appears. I now approve all comments from new visitors, in an attempt to keep spam at bay.

Joshua Levin 16 August 2009 at 19:51 25

Problem is the translation is not reliable and therefore can be used to get an idea about what the text is. If you want to communicate with someone via this service – i.e. for business purposes – this is not the right tool, and you’ll need a real human, professional translator. There’s a service called Transbox, of a company called OneHourTranslation.com (I’m using their service and not affiliated with them bu any mean) which allows me to translate my e-mails. The idea is that I’m sending an e-mail to an e-mail address they give me and the e-mail is translated and routed to the recipient as if it was sent by me. The recipient thinks I’m speaking his language! And vice versa: If the customer sends me an e-mail, I simply forward it to them and receive it back translated.

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Miraz Jordan 17 August 2009 at 09:42 40

Sounds interesting, Joshua.

For sure, machine translations such as the one I mentioned are suitable for meaningful and important communications, but I’m impressed by just how useful they are.

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