Google Docs: now with translation

At Google, I often collaborate with colleagues around the world, so it's quite common to be working with someone whose native language is different from my own. To make sharing content easier, we just added the ability to translate documents into Google Docs.

With this feature you can write a doc once, and with a few clicks make it available in any of 42 supported languages: Albanian, Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croation, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese.

Here is an example of an interview feedback form being translated from English to Russian.

When you combine this new feature with the template gallery, things get more interesting. Anyone in your domain can make a template, and put it in your organization's own gallery. From there, colleagues from around the world will be able to grab a copy of the template and with a couple of clicks, localize it into the language that they're most comfortable with. All of the document's original formatting and layout will be preserved.

You can find the Translate option under the Tools menu.

Posted by Jeff Harris, Associate Product Manager, Google Docs team

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