Here’s a new feature for those who use Google Talk that should be of interest to teachers of foreign languages – 29 translation ‘bots‘ that can be added to Google Talk conversations. It all appears quite easy to use – for example, if you add en2zh@bot.talk.google.com as a friend in Google Talk and send it a message to translate from English to Chinese. You can use it as an interpreter in your group chat, or download the Google Talk client for BlackBerry and use it as a pocket translator.
The Google Talk Blog explains that for more languages, just add any of the 29 other translation bots. They’re named using two-letter language abbreviations as “[from language]2[to language]@bot.talk.google.com”, and the supported language pairs are: ar2en, bg2en, de2en, de2fr, el2en, en2ar, en2de, en2el, en2es, en2fr, en2it, en2ja, en2ko, en2nl, en2ru, en2zh, es2en, fi2en, fr2de, fr2en, hi2en, hr2en, it2en, ja2en, ko2en, nl2en, ru2en, uk2en, ur2en, zh2en. So, for French to German translation, talk to fr2de@bot.talk.google.com.
I have just tried that! Thanks for the tip! and when friends send you links to pages, you can use Moztrans for mozilla, thunderbird and seamonkey. This application translates the text from the page and you just need to mark the text without pasting it to another page – you know every second is valuable for chat maniacs! See it at http://home.interlecta.com/desktop