About a month ago, Google announced some things it was doing that would improve the way sites rank across different language versions of its search engine, in an effort that would clearly make Google more useful on a global scale. In what seems to be a continuation of this tradition, Google has announced a couple more language-based improvements to its products.
For one, they have released Cross-Language Enterprise Search on Google Enterprise Labs. It instantly translates your Google Search Appliance query from one language to one or more others using Google’s translation engine.
“Wondering if your Paris office has some documents in French that might be relevant to your search? Frustrated that your first language isn’t English, yet 90% of your corporate documents are in English? Now users can search in their native language, but find every document within the enterprise on the topic,” explains Cyrus Mistry, Google Enterprise Product Manager. “In addition, you can choose to have the results come back in any language and you can even translate the search result snippets (or documents themselves) into any language!” More details here.
Another release from Google is the Google Blog Gadget version 2.0. They released the original version of this gadget back in September. It is basically just a way to keep up with new posts on all of Google’s corporate blogs. This is a useful gadget to a guy like me, who tries to stay current on all things Google. One problem I had with this gadget was that a good percentage of the posts coming through were in other languages that I couldn’t read.
They have corrected this problem and made the new version translatable into a number of different langauges. Those supported include: Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Chinese (simplified), Chinese (traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese.
Now you can just chose the category of blogs you want to read and click “translate.” By default, they translate into whatever language your browser is set at. Of course, the usual translation issues are likely to still come into play.
