This postI know, I know, four posts in one day is a bit OCD, but this is too cool to let sit around. In Google Talk (and Gmail chat as well, of course), you can add translator bots as “friends,” and then you just open a chat window with them and type away, and they’ll translate what you type for you. For example, add en2it@bot.talk.google.com and start chatting with the bot, and whatever you type will come back in Italian. Here’s French:
True, machine translation isn’t ideal, but this isn’t a bad step at all, and it’s right where you need it when you’re chatting with someone in another language. Brilliant. (And thanks to Rikker for the heads-up on this.)
