gtalk translation botGoogle Talk has a cool new feature – translation bots – you can add them to your contact list and then just chat with them in your native language and they will reply back almost instantly with a pretty close translation (in the language of your chosen bot) of what you wrote. You can see a simple test on the right. The translation is not 100% accurate but hey …it’s pretty good!

So, if you want a translation buddy that will help you instantly with communication gaps between english and german speakers, just add en2de@bot.talk.google.com to your contact list in Google Talk. Currently there are 24 translation bots: ar2en, de2en, de2fr, el2en, en2ar, en2de, en2el, en2es, en2fr, en2it, en2ja, en2ko, en2nl, en2ru, en2zh, es2en, fr2de, fr2en, it2en, ja2en, ko2en, nl2en, ru2en, zh2en. Don’t forget to add the @bot.talk.google.com part at the end.

The really use of this feature will be handy also on you blackberry, if you use the Google Talk client for BlackBerry. With this you can transform you blackberry into a mobile translator!

For more information, there is a post about this feature on the Google Talk Blog.