Could it be any easier now to chat with international friends? MSN Messenger and Google Talk have live translation robots that make online bilingual dictionaries seem antiquated. After adding a particular translation “bot” to your contact list, it poses as an intermediary between you and a friend who speaks another language.

On Google Talk, your bot is named for a two-letter abbreviation of the languages you want translated, plus ‘bot.talk.google.com.’ Your English to Spanish bot, for example, is en2es@bot.talk.google.com. For a complete list of languages available (there are 24), check the details on this Google post. Whatever you type to your friend is instantly translated to his language, and vice versa.

Like any machine generated translation, the conversions aren’t perfect, but a few tests of mine proved the translations better than functional, with syntax intact and contextual word choice. Google comments, “…while machine translation isn’t perfect, we hope these bots can be helpful in bridging language barriers.”

Similar bots are available on MSN Messenger and Twitter, among others. This article from the Microsoft Research Machine Translation Team Blog explains the feature, and shows screenshots of a live translated chat.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 28th, 2008 at 10:26 am and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.