Do you have friends and co-workers around the world who have trouble reading English? Or, on the other hand, do you speak Spanish, French, or German, but have to deal with sending e-mail constantly to those darn Americans who never, ever speak a second language? Well for both of you Google’s forthcoming Automatic Message Translation for Gmail may be just what you need.
Automatic Message Translation as a Gmail feature has been in the works since 2009. At the time, Google engineers weren’t quite sure how people would use it.
According to Jeff Chin, the Google Translate Product Manager, “We heard immediately from Google Apps for Business users that this was a killer feature for working with local teams across the world. Some people just wanted to easily read newsletters from abroad. Another person wrote in telling us how he set up his mom’s Gmail to translate everything into her native language, thus saving countless explanatory phone calls (he thanked us profusely). I continue to use it to participate in discussions with the global Google offices I often visit.”