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Use Social Translate To Translate Tweets

Posted: 14 Sep 2010 03:10 AM PDT

Social Networking sites has made this world a small place to live in. Sitting here in India you can find out what a person in France is doing, just by following him on Twitter or Facebook. Social Networking sites has undoubtedly removed international boundaries.

But there are times when language becomes a barrier. What if a person you follow, tweets in a language that you don't know? If you are thinking about Google Translate which pops up every time you open a site in a foreign language, well that does not work with sites like Twitter or Facebook. See the example below:

One way is to copy the message and go to Google.com/translate. Easier way is to install Social Translate- an extension for Google Chrome.

Installing Social Translate

Social Translate is an extension for Google’s Chrome that translates updates on social networking sites into your native language on the fly using Google Translate. At present it supports Twitter, Facebook, Orkut, Flickr and Amplify. From my experience it works best for Twitter at present.

Install social translate from the extension gallery.

Once you install it, go to Extensions (or in Chrome address bar type chrome://extensions/) and click "Options" for Social Translate.

Here you can set your preferences regarding Translation Quality, and setting up Primary and Secondary Language.

Social Translate in Action

Once you have Social Translate installed, you'll see the Social Translate icon in the address bar for the pages where the extension can work. It translates the status message automatically. You'll see the icon next to the tweet that has been translated, and if you click on it, it'll show the original message below the translated tweet.

This is a must-have extension for those who spend time on social networks as it automatically translates messages to your native language. However, the translation reliability is not very good for small messages (which is clear in the above message). But that is because of limited ability of Google Translate which this extension uses.