Gmail Message Translation

Once you enable Message Translation, any message in a foreign language will have a link at the top: “Translate message to: English” (or whatever your default language is). One click, and the message will be converted.

“If all parties are using Gmail, you can have entire conversations in multiple languages with each participant reading the messages in whatever language is most comfortable for them,” says Gmail Software Engineer Darren Lewis.

“I use this feature everyday to help me work with teammates around the globe (they think my Japanese is much better than it really is…shhhh!),” he jokes.

Gmail Message Translation is now available in the Gmail Labs menu found under the green lab symbol on the top right of the page.

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The feature, quite simply, lets you click on an icon to upload an image either from your computer or from another Web site and have it be embedded within your message. You (somewhat surprisingly) do have to activate the feature within the Labs menu first, or it won’t show up. You also have to be in rich formatting mode for the feature to appear.

“Well, it’s about time,” Gmail Software Engineer Kent Tamura writes in his official blog posting. I think that pretty much sums it up.

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The option, now available in the Gmail Labs menu, lets you choose to place your inbox count before the word “Gmail” in the browser bar. That way, you can see how many new messages you have at a quick glance on a toolbar or inactive tab.

A handy little feature–though one already familiar to users of Gina Trapani’s Better Gmail Firefox extension, which has offered the option for quite some time.

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3. Google Adds “Tasks” to Gmail

Gmail Tasks, now found under the “Labs” setting tab, lets you click to add any reminder to yourself, then check off items as you finish them.

The function is also built into messaging. Once you activate tasks, you can select any e-mail, then select “Add to Tasks” under the “More Actions” menu to directly move the entire message into a Tasks item.

The Tasks lists can also be popped in and out of the main Gmail browser window, much like the way the Chat option works.

Gmail Tasks is certainly nothing groundbreaking, but it’s a nice functionality that had long been missing from the service. For people who have replaced their standalone e-mail clients with Gmail (or who might be considering a switch to a Web-based platform), its addition will no doubt sweeten the deal.

The Inquisitr’s Steven Hodson has some concerns, though, about how Tasks’ debut could affect smaller applications such as Remember The Milk (RTM) that had offered similar functionality with Gmail integration. You can read his thoughts here.

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The good news: despite a TechCrunch report suggesting that Gmail Labs was georetarded to the United States and United Kingdom, I’m seeing labs here in Australia.

Gmail labs offers a variety of optional extras, including layout tweaks, shortcuts and even a game titled “Old Snakey.” Taken alone it’s a traditional Google Labs style offering: throw some things up, get some feedback, run with the popular ones as standard eventually, and I have no issues about the model what so ever. But..well…it’s just not exciting. Nothing in Gmail Labs is a radical change from what Google is offering on Gmail now and all the options are window dressings, nothing more. And of course they still haven’t enabled drag and drop, the one feature that would further turn Gmail into a killer business/ enterprise mail app.

My recommendation: don’t spend more that 5 minutes playing with this. Gmail Labs is accessible via the Settings Menu within Gmail.

Related posts:

1. Gmail Adds New Custom Title Bar Labs Feature
2. Google Adds Message Translation Into Gmail Labs
3. GTFO: Five years on, Google finally adds drag and drop to Gmail