Google Reader translates feeds into your language
This is a screenshot of a Google Reader translated feed of a Spanish language blog.
(Credit: Google Reader)I fear I'm going to be wasting a lot more time in the blogosphere now.
Google Reader is now automatically translating RSS feeds. It's easy to use too. You just subscribe to a feed in any language and when it appears in your Google Reader you click on the "Feed Settings" tab on the top of the feed and then click "translate into my language." Presto! The feed becomes English.
The translation seemed pretty good on the Spanish-language blog I experimented with. You could tell it was machine translation but it was very readable. I had a harder time understanding a Japanese LOLCATS blog, but that may just be a symptom of the genre more than the translation.
We have glottology expert Brett Bavar at Google to thank for this. He worked on it in the 20 percent time that Google allows engineers to pursue their own projects, with help from the Google Translate team, according to a Google Reader blog post on Tuesday.
Check it out. Apurate!
This is what my Google Reader looked like after I subscribed to a Japanese blog.
(Credit: Google)
This is what my Google Reader looked like after it translated the Japanese blog feed into English and I opened one of the posts.
(Credit: Google Reader)
Elinor Mills covers Internet security and privacy. She joined CNET News in 2005 after working as a foreign correspondent for Reuters in Portugal and writing for The Industry Standard, the IDG News Service, and the Associated Press. E-mail Elinor.
