Google Toolbar for IE speaks your language

Updated July 2 at 10:30 a.m. PDT: The full list of supported languages has been added to the bottom of the story.

Toolbars have long been an effective way for software publishers to add several features to a browser at once, and the Google Toolbar has long been among the most popular of these. Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer introduces revamped translation tools, giving users one-click powers of conversion over many languages.

Google Toolbar for IE now offers one-click page translation.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

The toolbar now detects your default language setting and using the Translate button will attempt to convert the page to it. Clicking a link will automatically translate the new page, as long as its part of the same domain as the original. Forty-one languages are supported so far, from Spanish, French, Italian, and German to Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew, Hindi, Ukranian, and Vietnamese.

Not all words on a page will be translated, but from my tests that seems limited only to text that's been embedded in logos and other art. If you need a lot of on-the-fly translation, this could be a major time saver. The feature has not been extended to Google Toolbar for Firefox, although Google said on its blog post announcing the feature that it hopes to implement it soon.

The new feature supports Albanian, Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese.

[Orion Blastar]

Please let me know when it gets Thai support. I am trying to learn Thai, and my wife is Thai. Many conversion tools on the web don't support Thai. So it makes it harder for me to learn.

Then again almost every company has a toolbar these days and when you have too many of them, they tend to clutter the web browser and eat CPU cycles and system memory.

[srosenblatt]

If you click through to the Google blog link, you'll see that one of the 41 languages support is Thai. I'll add them to the bottom of the post to make it easier for others.

[winhtat]

Please let me know about this software and try to download it

[paul613]

Too bad many of us at work at places where you administrative rights to install a toolbar.