Gmail Labs just added another nifty tool to its suite of features—message translation. Using Google Translate, Gmail will help you translate any message that you receive in another language into a language you can understand. The feature can be used for 41 languages.
Gmail will suggest a language to translate the message to, and also gives you the option to translate the message to different language.
If your email conversation includes Gmail users, you can have entire conversation in multiple languages with each participant reading the messages in whatever language is most comfortable for them. Google admits that Google Translate doesn’t always get the perfect translation but the feature is helpful to get the general idea of the content of an email.
Jeff Chin, product manager for Google Translate, said that this feature, like many others rolled out of Gmail Labs, uses the “power of cloud computing” to scale this tool to all Gmail users without having to buy servers, install software, or write code that needs to be integrated into each application. Chin adds that the cloud has helped Google Translate process billions of words in several languages to all users. Plus, he says that the application is able to quickly add new languages and updates to users quickly and efficiently.
Gmail Labs also recently added several other useful features, including the ability to import email and contacts, web search in Gmail, and search suggestions.