The Google Blog announced the latest version of the Google Toolbar for IE (Internet Explorer) has new “advanced translation” capabilities. The translation features include:

• Automatic detection of languages other than your default language
• One click translation
• Client side (does not communicate with Google) language detection
• Automatic language translation on page clicks
• Real-time translation for dynamic content
• Auto translation feature (bypass click for translation) for frequent sites you visit

There are 41 different languages currently supported, including: Albanian, Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese.

Google has announced several new ways to use and control its Google Translate service, including the support of new HTML tags and attributes that will prevent Google from translating your content.

The “notranslate” meta tag will block an entire page from being translated. It looks like this:

If you only want to keep Google from translating a certain piece of content within a page, the “notranslate” attribute can be added to any HTML element, like this:

On the other hand, if you get a lot of international visitors and want to make it easier for them to translate your content, Google has a new widget that can be placed into any web page. When it’s installed, the widget looks like this:

The widget will display in the user’s language, so even if someone can’t read the rest of your page, s/he will be able to use the widget.

The Google Talkabout Blog announced the launch of an instant messenger bot that is an interpreter.

An instant messenger bot is a little computer program that accepts instant messages and automatically replies to them. AOL has the AIM Bot program for years, allowing developers to create these bots as they see fit. In any event, Google released a new bot that utilizes Google Translate and acts as your personal interpreter. Google currently has 29 different translation bots, including:

• ar2en
• bg2en
• de2en
• de2fr
• el2en
• en2ar
• en2de
• en2el
• en2es
• en2fr
• en2it
• en2ja
• en2ko
• en2nl
• en2ru
• en2zh
• es2en
• fi2en
• fr2de
• fr2en
• hi2en
• hr2en
• it2en
• ja2en
• ko2en
• nl2en
• ru2en
• uk2en
• ur2en
• zh2en

To set this up, set up a Google Talk buddy in the syntax of [from language]2[to language]@bot.talk.google.com. So, for French to German translation, talk to fr2de@bot.talk.google.com.

Here are examples of sample chats I had with my Google translate bots:

More coverage of this Google announcement can be found at Techmeme.

Google Operating System reports that Google Translate has dropped using Systran as the technology used by Google for translations. Google now uses their own home brewed version of translation technology to translate between the 25 languages available.

Yahoo’s Babel Fish still uses Systran technology, so if you are in a compare and contrast mood, you can compare the two. Google’s technology was created by Google’s research group and uses statistical machine translation. Google’s approach is a bit different from other approaches.

Google explains they:

feed the computer billions of words of text, both monolingual text in the target language, and aligned text consisting of examples of human translations between the languages. We then apply statistical learning techniques to build a translation model. We’ve achieved very good results in research evaluations.

The current language translation pairs include:

• 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

Garett Rogers reports that Google Translate has added a dictionary feature.

Rather than let you just translate a word from one language to the best guess in another, this tool shows you various meanings, so you can select the right option.

For example, “right” has multiple meanings in English, such as to mean a direction, to affirm something is correct or to mean something someone is entitled to. Translating it into French, some of these meanings are shown:

1. (not left) droit 2. bon 3. (not left) à droite 4. (completely) tout, complètement 5. (correctly) correctement, bien 6. directement, juste 7. droite (f)

Unfortunately, the new service isn’t fully documented. The help files fail to explain what the (m) and (f) notations for some words mean (probably masculine, feminine and for German — n for neuter word genders)

Below related meanings is also a “Related phrases” area that provides examples of the words in context, such as:

I’m all right je vais bien

versus

at the right moment à propos

As promised at its “Searchology” event last week, Google has launched cross-language information retrieval (CLIR). It’s now been added as a new feature to Google Translate and went live yesterday.

As Chris Sherman previously wrote, Google is playing a bit of catch-up with this initiative; Yahoo has been doing this on a more limited basis since 2005. Regardless, it appears to be a useful service, chiefly for non-English speakers seeking information from English-language sites.

As Google Engineering VP Udi Manber said, when he introduced the service last week, the goal is to open up the Web “universally to the whole world.” And although it works from 12 non-English languages into English, there’s also reciprocal functionality allowing English speakers to translate non-English pages.

In other words, I can now search for hotels in Paris on French-language pages or bars in Moscow from Russian sources.

The languages currently supported are: English, Arabic, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese (Traditional), Chinese (Simplified). The service is based on automated (machine) language translation and native speakers or those conversant enough in the non-English tongue will undoubtedly find awkward translations. But it’s a helpful tool (especial the side-by-side presentation of results) to compare pages.

In addition to the new Search Results translation feature, Google Translate continues to offer its long-standing Text and Web translation (again like Yahoo’s Babelfish), so it can equally be used as a foreign-language dictionary.

Here’s the official Google Blog Post explaining the service, Search without Boundaries.