Review: How Well Does Gmail's Message Translator Work?

At-a-click language translation is making strides, but is in no way perfect, as anyone who has used Yahoo's Babelfish knows.

Google recently announced the Google Labs' module Message Translation as an add-on for Gmail.

To enable Message Translation, you have to go into your Google Gmail account and click on "Settings" and then "Labs." Don't see the "Labs" setting? If you are using a version of Internet Explorer older than 7, you have to upgrade the browser to at least 7. "Labs" also are only available in Firefox 2.0 and higher, Safari version 3.0 and higher and in Google Chrome.

For testing, we enlisted the assistance of a native Russian speaker. We chose to do the test in Russian because of the Cyrillic character set. Languages that use completely different characters than English are more apt to be unsuccessfully translated when using online translation than, say, Spanish to English.

Upon opening the Russian language e-mail, Gmail automatically recognized that the message contained foreign characters. Of course, by default, the Gmail account is set to use English as the display language. Gmail displays the option "Translate message to English." We clicked that option and for those of you fluent in Russian, these were the results:

Original message:

Gmail Message Translation:

Hello! Sorry for the inconvenience, but our meeting was postponed to tomorrow, at four hours of the day. Please know in advance if someone can not attend for any reason. Thank you for your attention.

Our Russian interpreter gave the translation an approximate 90 percent correctness score, saying it was much better at handling Cyrillic translation than Babelfish. There was some awkwardness in the translation of "4:00 in the afternoon" -- Gmail translated it as "at four hours of the day."

Still, not bad at all. It will be interesting to see how Google will keep developing this feature.