Thanks to new technology, transportation and legislation, it is easier than ever to connect with people in far away countries — online and in real life. There is no technical solution yet to culture crash, but there are several ways to avoid language barriers online. Here’s a list of tips for translation, transliteration and pronunciation:

Search query translation

2lingual makes it easy to search Google in two languages. The home page has two search boxes. You select the language you want to search in (probably your native language) and the language you want your search query translated into. As you start typing, your query is translated in real time and search results start appearing.

My test query “search engine marketing” was translated into German “Suchmaschinen-Marketing” and retrieved relevant results.

Currently, 2lingual supports 2,704 possible bilingual search combination using the following 52 search languages.

Google Translate has a Translated Search tool, which is convenient too.

Web page translation

If you’re not much of a German speaker, translating the search terms is not much use. With Google Translate, you can translate both copied text and complete web pages.

You enter a text or upload it. Google starts translating as soon as you enter text in the the text box.

Say it out loud

Google Translate has also added a speaker icon. Click on it to have Google read the translation out loud. This only works for translations to English and it doesn’t work on my Mac yet.

Reading another alphabet

If you want to pronounce words written in another alphabet, Google Translate has a tool called “Show romanization”. Click it to read the text written phonetically in English. Right now, this works for all non-Roman languages except for Hebrew, Arabic and Persian.

photo credit: fdecomite