david j. garcia

If you regularly encounter language barriers, hopefully you already know about translate.google.com. It’s not perfect, but it can help. (For best results, I recommend having Google translate any output back into your own language, to get a better idea of how well your text translates back and forth, adjusting and repeating as necessary).

But did you know that this service is available for real-time conversation translation in Google Talk? Simply add one of several chat bots (such as en2es@bot.talk.google.com for English to Spanish). Now you can invite the robots when you chat with a colleague in Argentina, and they’ll translate your conversation back and forth as you go.

If you carry a BlackBerry, this technology may end up saving you a lot of difficulty some day. When you run into a communication wall, open your “Google Talk for BlackBerry” app, send your message to the bot, and instantly the bot replies with your message in the appropriate language. Or have the other person type a message to be translated for you. It’s clumsy, perhaps, but it’s nice to have the option if nothing else works.