You may now search the Web and ask to get foreign language web pages included in search results. Google will translate them on the fly. But you may also stop Google from translating your site.

Google Blogoscoped reports that Google’s cross-language search is up and running.

Google’s translation service has been there for a long time. Enter some text or a URL and Google has (tried to) translate the page for you. Needless to say, the translations themselves have sometimes had a comic slant, but you may at least get an idea on what the page is about.

Foreign language search results

Now Google takes this one step further. You may now search the web in your own language (let’s say English) and at the same time ask Google to include German web pages in the search results.

The result page has two columns: to the right search results in the original language, to the left links to the same pages translated into your own language.

Why?

Why does this matter? Well, there are some pretty large language communities out there with people that has access to so much information in their own language, that they do not feel the need to publish in other languages.

We know quite a few German, French, Spanish and English speaking people that stick to their own language, and feel uncomfortable with writing or reading other tongues (even if most of them know some English).

This means they will miss a lot of useful information. If an American wants to follow — let’s say — the European search engine scene, she will miss out of a lot of interesting analysis if she doesn’t not read French or German sites like Abondance or @-web.

Now these sites may be included in her search for SEM related information.

Google’s Franz Och, Maureen Heymans, and Jeff Chin put it this way:

While machine translation is not perfect, it’s usually good enough for you to obtain the gist of information in a language you might otherwise be unable to access. We think this feature will be particularly useful for our international users since although the majority of Internet users out there are non English speakers, a majority of the content on the Internet is still in English.

Note that search result translation does not support advanced Boolean search queries.

How to stop Google from translating

There are copyright issues involved here. The translated pages are served by Google and has a Google URL. Since Google keeps the original formatting and graphics ads will remain, and we guess that most web sites will not mind getting some additional visitors and PR.

However, you may stop Google from translating your pages. Add the following tag to the HEAD section of the HTML file:

<meta name="google" value="notranslate">

Languages supported

Google offers the following language pairs:

• 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

Google translation discussion group.
Pandia News in French (as translated by Google).