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39 Comments
- hyderalamgir, on 05/19/2009, -0/+39Lovely! Now my Nigerian friends don't have to translate their multi-billion $$ offers in English anymore
- hallisna, on 05/20/2009, -0/+24Nope...but I'm guessing we'll still have to translate their English into English.
- inactive, on 05/20/2009, -0/+17Must be set to Australian English.
- J353, on 05/20/2009, -1/+17Does anyone actually have pen pals that speak another language?
- Vliger2002, on 05/20/2009, -1/+16I tried to make a pen pal out of a simple pen...but I couldn't draw the smiley face on it because I only had one pen. :(
- ligyron, on 05/20/2009, -1/+15Does anyone actually have pen pals?
- sockpuppets, on 05/20/2009, -1/+12.buıʞɹoʍ ʇou s,ʇı
- Vliger2002, on 05/20/2009, -1/+11Does anyone actually speak another language?
- Amazan, on 05/20/2009, -0/+8It's a Babel Fish! Maybe I can stop taking these German classes now...
- CLAPYRHANDS, on 05/20/2009, -0/+7Someone check if it can do Klingon.
- d3sp, on 05/20/2009, -0/+5I just tried this for German and the translations are ghastly.
- dareyoutomove, on 05/20/2009, -0/+4Let's cram gmail in our ears
- BLyn, on 05/20/2009, -1/+4I love what the google team is doing with the lab features... but they really need a better way of organizing the list.
New features shouldn't be arbitrarily added into the middle - it forces me to reading through the entire (now substantially large) list periodically just to see what's new. - Wisgary, on 05/20/2009, -1/+4Can someone explain to me at which point this becomes the receiver's problem to solve rather than the sender? E-mail is supposed to be targeted, and personal. The person who emails, in an ideal world, should have received in some way your consent to send you email. This person wouldn't send you email in a language you would not understand, so why the hell is this feature enabled on the receiver's side, rather than the sender's side? So I can read foreign spam?
- Dotcommer, on 05/20/2009, -1/+4Thats what I was thinking. Do pen pals even exist anymore? I thought that died with the tradition of writing out letters and sending them through the mail...
- iDoraemon, on 05/20/2009, -5/+8Oh gawd no. I'm never enabling this feature if it ever becomes standard. I e-mail my Chinese and Japanese research colleagues in their native languages often since I know their languages well enough. Fortunately, it's not enabled by default.
The last thing I need is for me to think that they are responding back to me in retarded machine translated English when I know they communicate in English much better than I do in either Chinese or Japanese.
Good intention though, Gmail people. Oh, that reminds me.
"What do you call someone who knows three languages? Trilingual.
What do you call someone who knows two languages? Bilingual.
What do you call someone who knows one language? American."
-Anonymous - Puppetfunk, on 05/20/2009, -0/+3As a child I always wanted a pen pal, like an actual pen and paper one, but never knew how to get one. :(
- sirbeta, on 05/20/2009, -1/+4That's great, but I'm not sure the functionality was created from someone like you who obviously has no need for it.
- aamer, on 05/20/2009, -0/+2Yes.
- dtfinch, on 05/20/2009, -0/+2great for all that foreign-language spam I get
- mickhead, on 05/20/2009, -0/+2Maybe you're in the process of learning that language?
- andybryant, on 05/25/2009, -0/+1Fandabbidozi!
- EtherGnat, on 05/20/2009, -0/+1"Why would you be receiving mails from someone in a different language AND you didn't understand that language?"
Now? Not often. You know why? Because it'd be pointless for somebody to send me an e-mail I can't read. As the technology becomes better and more pervasive language barriers will start to disappear, and there will be no reason not to e-mail somebody because they speak a different language. - merelogic, on 05/20/2009, -1/+2Though this may not become very popular it's still an awesome feature...
- D3koy, on 05/20/2009, -0/+1There were all sorts of programs you could do in my elementary and middle school, but I can't say the same for you. I'm young enough that I could have found one online too, in middle school.
- varchar255, on 05/20/2009, -0/+1No need to look--if it's good, it'll be on Digg and the Gmail blog at http://gmailblog.blogspot.com and then Ctrl+F to find and enable it.
I'm curious if they add labs to the list in a random order since having it in alphabetical order might skew usage towards the first ones listed. - inactive, on 05/20/2009, -0/+1...or at least, attempts to.
- liuite, on 05/20/2009, -0/+1I've never had much success translating portuguese using google.
- fabio1, on 05/20/2009, -0/+1maybe that's what they intended? so that you end up annoyed but also able to find out some cool new feature you never knew existed?
- planetbuzzman, on 05/20/2009, -0/+1I have a few friends in other countries. I write to them and use Gmail. The translator really doesnt' do that great of job some times. Although it is better then nothing.
- iDoraemon, on 05/20/2009, -1/+1Of course not, but if this feature ends up getting enabled by default, this would be a nuisance, since it would translate my e-mails when it shouldn't ever. That'd be bad UI design. The title of this article even makes it seem like Gmail would do it automatically, but the article does state that it is optional. Hopefully it stays that way.
- LaurenCC, on 05/20/2009, -0/+0So now I'll understand those creepy foreign emails asking to be my friend
- guilhermedarosa, on 05/23/2009, -0/+0Wow....this works for old archived emails too?
- jennifererichar, on 06/30/2009, -0/+0Inputing newer and more data into the system helps Google's machine translations get better, but it remains far behind the quality and efficiency of human translations. For people or businesses who need high quality translations at a low cost, services like mygengo.com are the best solutions. This way you get the best of both worlds - its simple and reliable. Google's trying its best, but when you need it to count, don't rely on machine translations
- EtherGnat, on 05/20/2009, -1/+1Well for starters you might not know the recipients native language, particularly if they live in a region where more than one dialect is spoken. At a bare minimum you'd have to choose from among a long list of languages every time you sent an e-mail, as opposed to setting your own language once. I think Google got it mostly right, although having both as options would be nice.
What *would* be a nice feature would be the option to automatically translate replies into the language of the e-mail you're responding to. - MightyUpsetter, on 05/20/2009, -2/+1Why would you be receiving mails from someone in a different language AND you didn't understand that language?
Pointless. - solaniisrex, on 05/20/2009, -2/+1Then you should translate it yourself, you don't learn anything if you just use an auto-translator like that...
- EricDraven, on 05/20/2009, -3/+1When I first read the headline, I actually thought Google was sifting thru our email and translating mail without our consent... or maybe intercepting messages and translating them as they arrive in the inbox.
- shin6ty, on 05/20/2009, -3/+0WTF? I don't get foreign-language emails.
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