What did you say?

I learned something new tonight. Actually, it's just another example of how smart Google is, and how powerful their assistance can be... when you know where to fund it.

When I get bored, sometimes I hit the "Next Blog" link at the top of the Blogger site. This takes you to a random blog. Fortunately for Blogger, they're international. That drives more traffic, more eyes, and hence money (at least in someone's business plan, though I'm still not sure how). Unfortunately for me, I don't speak Portuguese, Romanian, Japanese, Spanish, nor many of the other languages of people that post on Blogger. Fortunately for me, I know a little about Google. :-)

I know that Google has a Language Tools link on their home page next to the search box. That page then has a Translate a web page section. If you give Google a URL and tell it to translate from Portuguese to English, for instance, you can generally get a good enough machine translation to get the gist of the site. But what if you don't know the starting language? Us dumb Americans suck at internationalization stuff. Well, a little URL hacking and I found out that Google doesn't really care what the originating site's language is (or more precisely, they can figure it out themselves.) So, by adding http://translate.google.com/translate?u= in front of a site's URL that you need translated, Google will do all of the work!

I'm working on a bookmarklet that will do this automatically, but it's getting late. I'll add that as a follow up post tomorrow.

Auf Wiedersehen. Arrivederci. Tot ziens. Adeus. :-)