Use Social Translate To Translate Tweets

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:

tweet in foreign languageOne 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.

Social Translate Options 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.

social translate in action

social translate in action with original 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.

Do you know of any other extension that can be used for translating messages on Social Networking site? Do share it with us.

4 Comments

Sheetal September 15, 2010

Hey this is awesome plugin.. Yes i have seen people tweeting in hindi, Marathi, gujarati and so many languages but i always used to avoid the pain in translating them and reading.. but this tool should do all for me.
Does this work for mobiles as well?

Anshul September 17, 2010

Thanks Sheetal.. I am using this tool and must say it works nice, though as I mentioned, there are times when the translation is not that good.
If you install it, it’ll also work with Facebook.

As far as I know, it doesn’t work for mobiles.

Virtual Character September 17, 2010

I agree with Sheetal, this is amazing. Thanks for sharing this as I also follow and have followers that write in different languages. This helps a lot!

Anshul September 17, 2010

I am glad it was helpful for you. 🙂