The Google Translate team is always thinking about how to make information accessible to all internet users, not matter what language it is written in. Often people come across webpages in foreign languages, but don’t know that they can go to Google Translate to find out what the page says. This problem is especially challenging for government institutions that have wide audiences and information that needs to be translated into multiple languages. The Polish Ministry of Economy recently solved this problem by using our website translation element to make their webpage multilingual for visitors who don’t speak Polish.

By embedding the website translation element, the Ministry enabled visitors to translate site text instantly without leaving the Ministry’s webpage. With the addition of the Google Translate drop-down box, their webpages are now accessible to Chinese, English, French, German, Russian, and Spanish speakers who don’t have any knowledge of Polish at all!

While the translation quality is not perfect, it is good enough to allow visitors who don’t speak Polish to interact in a way they never could have before. Check out the Ministry’s site or add the website translation element to your own webpage!

Posted by Andrew Gomez, Associate Product Marketing Manager

Football is one of the truly global languages. Throughout the decades, fans have cheered, argued and shared tears as their teams have swept to victory with a wonder-goal in extra-time, or crumbled under the pressure of a penalty shootout. While emotions etched onto the faces of spectators are all too easy to read, verbally communicating across languages can be difficult. The BBC World Service now offers a way to break down these language barriers through World Cup Team Talk, which uses Google’s machine translation technology.

Back in March, the BBC World Service launched an experiment using Google Translate to explore the transformative power of the Internet and facilitate real-time discussion across languages. On SuperPower Nation Day, BBC World Service readers from around the world were invited to discuss the Nation Day event online—and have their comments translated live for others to read.

Although translations were not always perfect, people found the project useful and engaging—and its success inspired the BBC World Service to run another campaign to allow football fans from across the globe to join in conversation around the beautiful game.

Starting on June 11, football fans across the world will be able to contribute to a global conversation in 11 languages—Albanian, Arabic, Chinese, English, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swahili, Vietnamese and Welsh—and receive replies from fellow fans that are automatically translated back into their native language by Google Translate. The posts will also appear on an interactive map so people can see where in the world the contributions are coming from.



On the other side of the pond, the Boston Globe has integrated Google Translate into each article on its Corner Kicks soccer blog to extend the site’s reach across a multi-lingual readership, locally in New England and worldwide. The Globe is no stranger to translation tools. Its award-winning photography blog The Big Picture also uses Google Translate for automatically translating summaries and captions and for approving comments from around the world, including its introduction to the World Cup.

With that, let the games begin—in whatever language you want.

Posted by Jeff Chin, Product Manager