The official Gmail blog reports that Google's email service now supports automatic message translation.
The news arrives after the search engine giant slowly upgraded every Gmail account from 7.5 GB to 10 GB of virtual space in celebration of Google Drive's launch. But like the capacity increase, users may not see the new translation feature for a few days as Google slowly rolls out Gmail's new feature to millions of users.
"Did you ever dream about a future where your communications device could transcend language with ease? Well, that day is a lot closer. Back when we launched automatic message translation in Gmail Labs, we were curious to see how people would use it," writes Jeff Chin, Product Manager, Google Translate.
"We heard immediately from Google Apps for Business users that this was a killer feature for working with local teams across the world. Some people just wanted to easily read newsletters from abroad. Another person wrote in telling us how he set up his mom’s Gmail to translate everything into her native language, thus saving countless explanatory phone calls (he thanked us profusely)," he adds.
Since translation was one of the more popular experiments, the Gmail team decided its was time for the feature to graduate into the real world, but without the cap and gown. Users will know if the new feature has gone live by spotting the word "translate" in the header at the top of a message written in a different language.
"If you're bi-lingual and don't need translation for that language, just click on Turn off for: [language]. Or if you'd like to automatically have messages in that language translated into your language, click Always Translate. If you accidentally turned off the message translation feature for a particular language, or don't see the Translate message header on a message, click on the down arrow next to Reply at the top-right of the message pane and select the Translate message option in the drop-down," Chin reports.
In addition to the translate feature, Gmail will also have Title Tweaks in which the text in the browser tab has been changed so that users can more easily see if there are any new messages. Gmail is also receiving Smart Mute which moves "noisy" email threads out of the inbox. For more information about all three features, read the blog here.
