As part of my job I’m constantly checking Web pages written in other languages. Usually Spanish, but German, Italian and even Chinese. Google Chrome can auto-translate, but how do I turn that feature on?
Machine translation. One of the best sources of strange haikus and incomprehensible sentences where each of the words makes sense but as a way to convey information, they can be more than a bit odd. In fact, you can see this at work by feeding a paragraph of your own prose to Google Translate, then feed the translation back, to convert it back into English.
If I do that for the previous paragraph, translating English -> Thai -> English, it ends up thusly: “Machine translation. One of the best sources of haikus strange and incomprehensible sentence, each word that makes sense. But as a way to present information that they have more than a bit odd. In fact, you can see this at work by feeding your own prose paragraph Google Translate to translate it back to English food after conversion.”.
Still, it’s better than having zero idea what the page is about, so it’s still beneficial. Before you worry about turning it on, let’s start with a basic test: go to Google Italy — at google.it — and see if you get this:
As you can see along the top, it’s identified that the page is in Italian and offered to translate it. If you see this for Google but not for other pages, it’s possible the other pages aren’t properly former and are missing the meta data that indicates its native language. Not good.
If you don’t get the translate bar then you need to enable it. We can do that!
Go to your Chrome settings. For a shortcut, click here: chrome://settings
Now scroll down to the bottom, because what you seek is in the Advanced settings area. Find this:
Then click on “Show advanced settings…”
Now lots more appears. Scroll down further until you find this section:
Make sure you have the box checked adjacent to “Offer to translate pages that aren’t in a language you read.” and you’re good to go.
That’s all there is to it. If those pages are properly written, at least.
Good luck! Or, perhaps, buona fortuna!