Google Expands Translation Toolbox

[Rubber Duck]

SAN FRANCISCO — Google Inc. planned to introduce a feature Wednesday that automatically translates Internet search requests and results in 12 languages, underscoring the rapidly growing company's ambitions outside the United States.

The tools allow Google's users to enter search requests in their native languages and then choose to have the phrases as well as the accompanying results automatically translated into another language.

Users can then click on a link and have the entire Web page translated through a service that Google had already been offering.

Google expects the new translation service for search results to be particularly popular outside of the United States and the United Kingdom because so much of the Internet's content is published in English.

Besides English, Google's search results translator works in Arabic, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, Korean, traditional Chinese and simplified Chinese.

Yahoo Inc., which runs the Web's second largest search engine behind Google, already offers a service that has been automatically translating search results in Germany, France and Japan since 2005, spokeswoman Kathryn Kelly said. The Sunnyvale-based company also offers translation tools through its BabelFish site.....

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/fn/4830610.html