Welcome to SheetNatives.com, a collection of tips, guides, and advice on Google Sheets. Today, I am going to share a great option of Google Sheets Translate and bulk translation with the help of Google Translate.
What is Google Translate?
There is a low chance to use the internet and not being familiar with Google Translate.
Google Translate is a free multilingual statistical and neural machine translation service developed by Google, to translate text and websites from one language into another.
It offers a website interface, a mobile app for Android and iOS, and an application programming interface that helps developers build browser extensions and software applications.
As of July 2020, Google Translate supports 109 languages at various levels and as of April 2016, claimed over 500 million total users, with more than 100 billion words translated daily.
Launched in April 2006 as a statistical machine translation service, it used United Nations and European Parliament documents and transcripts to gather linguistic data.
Rather than translating languages directly, it first translates the text to English and then pivots to the target language in most of the language combinations it posits in its grid, with a few exceptions including Catalan-Spanish.
During a translation, it looks for patterns in millions of documents to help decide on which words to choose and how to arrange them in the target language. Its accuracy, which has been criticized and ridiculed on several occasions, has been measured to vary greatly across languages.
In November 2016, Google announced that Google Translate would switch to a neural machine translation engine – Google Neural Machine Translation (GNMT) – which translates “whole sentences at a time, rather than just piece by piece. It uses this broader context to help it figure out the most relevant translation, which then rearranges and adjusts to be more like a human speaking with proper grammar”.
I am using it every day, as much as I am using Google Sheets 😉
How to start with Google Sheets Translate?
Some years ago, I found an amazing option to combine these fantastic tools together.
And that is just GOOGLETRANSLATE function on Google Sheet.
With this formula, you can use the power of Google Translate and translate 100 languages to each other.
This is the way you can use it:
Enter a word in one language in a cell, and then use the formula =GOOGLETRANSLATE(text, source_language, target_language) in another cell to automagically translate it!
You can even drag the fill handle at the bottom of the formula cell down to apply this formula to more than one cell.
For example in the image above, I translated four words from Engish into German, Spanish, Arabic, and Persian. In the Image, B3 is reading the “Apple”, “en” is the language code for English as a source language and “de” is the code for German as targeted language.
To find out more about language code, you can check this link.
Spreadsheet translations are an excellent supplement in the language learning process but limited once you get into the territory of phrases and colloquialisms.
Also, this function can be used for daily works of copywriters, marketers, and etc but don’t forget, the machines are not perfect yet and they might make mistakes if you want to use the results for officials, please check them before with some experts or official translator.
I hope you enjoyed this post and let us know if you use this function or you have any other cool ideas in the comment below.
Cheers ?