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Google Reader Now Translating Feeds Automatically [RSS]  (View post)

MZaza [PersonRank 10]

Tuesday, November 11, 2008
16 years ago3,927 views

<<Google Reader and Google Translate have teamed up to bring a neat new feature — you can choose to have feeds in Google Reader machine-translated on the fly. For instance, if your Google Reader language is set to English under Settings > Preferences, a subscription to a blog in Japanese will appear (more or less) in English. It doesn't seem to have been rolled out for everybody quite yet, as some of us at Lifehacker could access the option on the Feed settings drop-down menu and some couldn't. A neat trick, but the automated translations still have a tendency to be unintentionally hilarious. Users of the new Reader feature are promised that as Translate gets better, so will the translations of the feeds.>>

via lifehacker

Above 1 comments were made in the forum before this was blogged,

Juha-Matti Laurio [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

[Moved from "Auto-translate feature added to Google Reader" – Tony]

http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2008/11/is-your-web-truly-world-wide.html

Juha-Matti Laurio [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

This was covered at TechCrunch too:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/11/10/google-reader-auto-translates-stuff-read-anything-you-like/

Tony Ruscoe [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

It would be good if Google included in the user-agent string requesting the feed how many subscribers you had in each language.

Does anyone know whether this handles translating multiple languages in the same feed? (I mean one language per post rather than multiple languages in the same post.)

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

(Added an update with Google's response in regards to disallowing translations.)

Jérôme Flipo [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

It doesn't work in the "all items" view for me :(

Job [PersonRank 1]

16 years ago #

There's a problem with auto-translate. Google Reader assumes that my preferred language is the language of the computer I am using. I am an English speaker in Switzerland, so Google Reader thinks I want everything translated to German, when I would rather have the feed translated FROM German to English. I can't find any way to correct this. It would be better if Reader looked to my preferences for my language of choice. Gmail displays everything in English, not German, but Reader displays all the navigational links in German. I hope that Reader follows Gmail's lead on this one. Or Reader should at least allow me to choose which language to translate to rather than trying to guess.

Tony Ruscoe [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

> I can't find any way to correct this.

Try using this link: http://www.google.com/reader/view/?hl=en

Does that help? If I change that to hl=de I get everything translated into German (including the UI) so perhaps it will do. I tried to test this but changing my browser language to French didn't translate things into French, so I'm not sure...

I think the way of translating items is a bit clumsy right now. There should be a setting for each feed accessible from the "Manage Subscriptions" page.

Right now, if you switch on "Translate into my language" in the "All items" view, clicking through to the original posts will return an error because Google can't translate English to English. If I just set it on a folder, I only see the translated version when viewing that folder rather than "All items". Confused? No wonder! This really needs some attention to make it more intuitive and consistent.

And while I'm moaning about it, I was surprised that it only works in the standard Google Reader interface. If it was a setting on each feed, like I suggested above, it could surely just be done server side so that all foreign language feeds could be automatically translated in any interface – e.g. mobile, iPhone, iGoogle, etc.

Job [PersonRank 1]

16 years ago #

[put at-character here]Tony. That does the trick, but it would still be nice not to have to edit the URL everytime I load Reader. And, oh, my, is the translation bad.

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