Following last week's report, Google's Cross Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) is now a reality. Meaning, If you type "Good Morning" in the Original Text box you can convert it into the language of your choice.

Languages supported for Cross-language search and translation are:

English to/from Arabic

English to/from Chinese (Simplified)

English to/from Chinese (Traditional)

English to/from French

English to/from German

English to/from Italian

English to/from Korean

English to/from Japanese

English to/from Russian

English to/from Spanish

English to and from Portuguese

Chinese (Simplified) to/from Chinese (Traditional)

German to and from French

As Franz Och, Research Scientist; Maureen Heymans, Software Engineer; and Jeff Chin, International Product Manager explain in their Official Blog, “Now, you can search for something in your own language (for example, English) and search the web in another language (for example, French). If you're looking for wine tasting events in Bordeaux while on vacation in France, just type "wine tasting events in Bordeaux" into the search box on the "Search results" tab on Google Translate. You'll then get French search results and a (machine) translation of these search results into English."

He also adds, "While machine translation is not perfect, it's usually good enough for you to obtain the gist of information in a language you might otherwise be unable to access. We think this feature will be particularly useful for our international users since although the majority of Internet users out there are non English speakers, a majority of the content on the internet is still in English."