Google translates Gmail to 12 languages, asks for volunteers to target 144 more

Saturday, April 23, 2005 

Google has translated its email service, Gmail, into 12 languages, and it has put up a form that allows the public to volunteer to translate the Gmail interface into 144 more languages. Available for its first year with an English interface only, Gmail now appears in 13 languages:

• Chinese (2 variants, "Simplified" and "Traditional")
• Dutch
• English (2 variants, US and UK)
• French
• German
• Italian
• Japanese
• Korean
• Portuguese
• Russian
• Spanish

While most of the languages listed in the volunteering form are old, three are relatively new: Borkborkbork, Klingon, and Esperanto. Additionally, the form lists Pig Latin, which is a method of rearranging words to obscure a language, rather than a language in itself.

Google has also recently introduced a feature known as "My Search History," which allows users to record their searches. Use of the search history requires that the user have and log in to a Google or Gmail account.

Languages into which the Gmail interface may be translated:

Languages

Abkhazian Afar Afrikaans Albanian Amharic Arabic Armenian Assamese Aymara Azerbaijani Bashkir Basque Belarusian Bengali Bhutani Bihari Bislama Borkborkbork Bosnian Breton Bulgarian Burmese Cambodian Catalan Corsican Croatian Czech Danish ElmerFudd Esperanto Estonian Faroese Fiji Finnish

Frisian Galician Georgian Greek Greenlandic Guarani Gujarati Hacker Hausa Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Icelandic Indonesian Interlingua Interlingue Inuktitut Inupiak Irish Javanese Kannada Kashmiri Kazakh Kinyarwanda Kirundi Klingon Kurdish Kyrgyz Laothian Latin Latvian Lingala Lithuanian Macedonian

Malagasy Malay Malayalam Maltese Maori Marathi Moldavian Mongolian Nauru Nepali Norwegian (Bokmål) Norwegian (Nynorsk) Occitan Oriya Oromo Pashto, Pushto Persian PigLatin Polish Portuguese (Portugal) Punjabi Quechua Rhaeto-Romance Romanian Samoan Sangho Sanskrit ScotsGaelic Serbian Serbo-Croatian Sesotho Setswana Shona Sindhi

Sinhalese Siswati Slovak Slovenian Somali Sundanese Swahili Swedish Tagalog Tajik Tamil Tatar Telugu Thai Tibetan Tigrinya Tonga Tsonga Turkish Turkmen Twi Uighur Ukrainian Urdu Uzbek Vietnamese Volapuk Welsh Wolof Xhosa Yiddish Yoruba Zhuang Zulu

Sources

• "Which languages does Gmail support?" — Gmail Help Center, April 12, 2005

• "Translate Gmail into your language" — Gmail Help Center,

• Avni Shah. "From lost to found" — Google Blog, April 20, 2005