The search results from the Google Translate search results come in two columns. The left column shows you machine translated search while the right column contains the original language text.
Language barriers still pose a big obstacle to accessing information on the web. One of the disadvantages of machine translations is that the quality of translations is often far from perfect. Franz Och, Maureen Heymans and Jeff Chin, the team behind the Google Translate Search Results feature, freely admit this on the search engine's official blog.
When you look for results on search engine optimisation in German, for example, you might come across the odd translation - for instance, "Who would like to make successful Suchmsachinen optimization, search machine optimization for Google must make" - but in the majority of cases you will get a translation that will easily enable users to obtain an idea of what a particular website is about.
Native English speakers will probably only occasionally use Google Translate, as they will be able to find a sufficient number of search results in English on the web for most searches. The world wide web remains dominated by websites in English, which is mainly due to high internet usage in English speaking countries like the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and the UK.
While languages like German and Japanese used to come in second place in the percentage of internet languages a few years ago, the number of users from China has grown drastically within the last few years, making Chinese the second biggest internet language. Currently Google does not have a strong position in the search engine market in China. This focus on further developing translation features could be seen as part of the search engine's drive to gain precious search engine territory in emerging markets like China.
Speakers of foreign languages will be able to benefit significantly from Google Translate's search results tool, which features eleven different languages - among them Chinese (both traditional and modern), Arabic and Russian.
The Google Translate search result tool has been released in beta status, which means that although it is already publicly available, the tool is still being tested and will continue to be improved over time.
After the launch of Google's "universal search" last week, in which we saw the integration of results across different media into search results, Google's latest development ultimately invites an intriguing question: will the integration of websites across different languages be the next big step for Google?
