Google Chrome: instant web translation flattens earth even more

Users of the latest beta of Google Chrome (you can download it by following the beta link at http://chrome.google.com or choosing About Google Chrome, Check for Updates from the tools menu) can now have web pages written in 52 other languages translated automatically, without the use of plugins or extensions. For now, this only works in Windows as language setting have not been implemented in the Chrome betas for Linux and OS X, but the features works quite well.

The Chrome team posted the following video on the Chrome blog demonstrating how it works:

As with any literal translation tool, it isn't perfect. However, it quickly detects a language other than your default and gives you access to information on the page using the same technologies found in Google's online translation tools.

As the team notes in their blog,

We hope that the development of online translation tools like this one will help make all the world's information universally accessible in an easy, frictionless way – imagine reading a diversity of foreign language news sources in your mother tongue, or easily conducting online commerce across borders and languages.

The translation tools are expected to make their way to Chrome's stable release in the next few weeks.