Google talk translation

You can now have a chat bot that translates for you.

I know web resources for translation aren’t new, but having them around as competitive features is pretty cool.  Every once in a while I marvel at what our civilization accomplishes, and this is one of those moments.  This isn’t as big as penicillin of course, one has to have perspective, but how cool is it that we have translation software at our fingertips?

If you want to use Google’s translation service and you’re in Gmail with chat enabled, or Google Talk, or AIM, just add a new contact of the format xx2yy@bot.talk.google.com.  XX and YY are the two letter codes for the language you are translating.  So in my example I added fr2en@bot.talk.google.com and suddenly I had a French to English translator.