An email arrives in a language you do not read. On the desktop version of Gmail there has been a “Translate message” link at the top since 2011; on the phone, where most mail is now read, there has been nothing but copy-and-paste into Google Translate. Google says that changes by the end of this month: native translation is coming to the Gmail app on Android and iOS.
How it works
When a message arrives in a language other than the one your Gmail is set to, a banner appears above it offering to translate. Tap Translate and the message body is replaced with a translation into your language; tap again to see the original. You can tell it to always translate from that language, or to never show the banner for it. The feature is on by default and can be turned off in the app’s settings. It uses Google Translate, so it handles the same hundred-plus languages, and it works on the phone the way it has on the web: quickly, and about as well as Translate does for that pair.
How good is “as well as Translate”?
For French, German, Spanish, Portuguese and Chinese into English — the pairs the announcement mentions — very good; a business email will come out readable and usually correct. For Bangla the picture is mixed. Bangla into English is now respectable for plain prose and poor for anything idiomatic, and English into Bangla produces the stiff, over-formal register that Translate has always produced — understandable, not something you would send. Numbers, names and dates survive translation; tone does not.
Why it matters here
Bangladesh’s freelancers and exporters deal with clients in Germany, Japan, Korea and the Gulf whose emails arrive in their own languages more often than the English-speaking world assumes, and a translation that is one tap away instead of a copy-paste away is a real saving across a day of correspondence. It matters in the other direction too: a German buyer with the same feature will now read a Bangladeshi supplier’s Bangla email in German, which is an argument for writing to clients in careful English rather than trusting the machine at their end.
Two habits
- Before replying to anything that involves money, a deadline or a specification, tap through to the original and check the numbers.
- Do not reply in a translated language you cannot read. Reply in English; their Gmail will translate it.
Source: Gadgets Now, via Prothom Alo.
