Gmail: Translate your email messages on the fly

There is another new feature rollout from Gmail labs. This time they integrated language translation right into your inbox. This will allow Gmail users to translate their email messages between 41 languages. There is update on Gmail blog.

To enable this feature, navigate to Gmail labs Tab and enable “Message Translation” (See below).

In order to test this feature, I copied some Spanish text from web and sent an email to myself.

When email is opened, it displays “Translate message to: XXXX” link if “Message Translation” is enabled and based on Language preferences (See Gmail settings) of user it will translate message to preferred language. In my case, my default Gmail Language preferences set to English. So it was displaying “Translate message to: English” link to translate my Spanish text message to English language.

So main advantage of this technology is that now Gmail users will able to send email messages in their preferred languages without worrying about language that their readers understand. Though this is a cool feature, I personally found that language translation from Google is not as natural as it would be if done using human translator. But I think the technology will eventually mature in coming days or future and help cross language barrios at least on the web.

So what do you think about this feature?