Google Reader, where all of your favorite RSS feeds come together on one friendly page in your Google account, can now automatically translate the news. For example, if you only read English, you can still stay current on the local beats in Ecuador, Thailand or Italy. Simply search and subscribe to news sources from those countries; then in the “Feed settings” tab, select the option “Translate into my language.” The page will automatically reload and all items will appear in your language. You can change your language in Google account settings.

To test the new service, I subscribed to a few news feeds from Guadalajara, Mexico –El Informador and El Mural. The translation is nearly instantaneous. The translated content is not flawless, but highly readable. A news story in Spanish titled “Barack alista su equipo de trabajo” was translated as “Barack enlists his team,” and the article’s lead translates as:

WASHINGTON - The president-elect of the United States, Barack Obama, wants a government with diverse racial, geographic and gender, said his transition team, announced that it will spend $12 million and employ 450 people in the period.

While a story on politics translates well, digital media blogger Elinor Mills didn’t have the same luck with the translation of a Japanese LOLCATS blog, which she concluded must “be a symptom of the genre more than the translation.” Click here to read her post about Google Reader’s new function, plus view screenshots of the feed and the humorously translated Japanese captions (”I have a ball into a cat?”).

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 12th, 2008 at 11:44 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.