I thoroughly enjoy the fact that most teams at Google have a “Labs” section of their product which allow them to try out new features and ideas in a live environment. Sometimes these ideas catch on, and sadly, sometimes they don’t.

Today, the Gmail team announced that one super popular labs feature was making its way to the actual product, and that’s automatic message translation. It’s a handy feature that translates emails on the fly without you having to know what language it’s even in.

This is a feature that I’ve been enjoying on Google’s Chrome browser, making it extremely seamless to translate content on the fly. By using this tool in Gmail, you’ll be able to answer in the sender’s native language as well. Here’s what the team had to say about the feature’s graduation today:

Since message translation was one of the most popular labs, we decided it was time to graduate from Gmail Labs and move into the real world. Over the next few days, everyone who uses Gmail will be getting the convenience of translation added to their email. The next time you receive a message in a language other than your own, just click on Translate message in the header at the top of the message.

In case you’ve never tried the feature out, here’s what it looks like in action:

The way that you automatically feel bi-lingual thanks to this feature is almost like magic.

In addition to the translate tool coming out of Gmail labs, two other features have made their way into the full product as well; Title Tweaks and Smart Mute. The Title Tweaks feature changes the title in your browser’s tab to tell you that you have new messages and Smart Mute keeps those really loud and obnoxious threads out of your inbox.

Unfortunately, along with new features, the Gmail team must retire some older labs items that never really took off in popularity. Those features are:

Old Snakey, Mail Goggles, Mouse Gestures, Hide Unread Counts, Move Icon Column, Inbox Preview, Custom Date Formats and SMS in Chat gadget. Please note that the SMS in Chat lab is not being retired, just the gadget associated with it.

I’m actually quite sad about the retirement of Mail Googles, which in case you forgot was a tool that tried to keep you from sending emails too late at night when you were drunk. When clicking the “send” button on a new email, you would be presented with a few mathematical problems that I couldn’t seem to figure out sober sometimes:

Goodbye Mail Googles, thanks for saving me from many an embarrassment.

Private social networking app Path has announced today that it will be crowdsourcing the translation of its app into 20 languages:

Coming soon: Path in 20 languages. Visit translate.path.com if you would like to help. bit.ly/I8Q3Vd =)

— Path (@path) April 6, 2012

In a blog post, the company outlined its plans to use New York City based Smartling to let people help it handle the translations. This is a similar approach to what Twitter and Facebook have done to localize its sites:

Today we’re taking another step to improve the Path experience for those of you abroad. We have set up a new translation platform, powered by Smartling, which allows you to sign up and edit the languages available for Path, submit translations and work with others to ensure your language is fully supported in future versions of Path.

Currently we are working on translations for Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, German, Swedish, Japanese, Korean and Simplified Chinese. In the future we are planning to add Traditional Chinese, Thai, Arabic, Bahasa Indonesian, Russian, Turkish, Malay, Dutch, Greek, Norwegian Bokmål and English (UK).

By visiting its translation site, you can register for access to become one of the official Path translators:

Currently, Twitter has over 400,000 volunteer translators helping the company localize all of its products for different geographic regions and languages. While Path’s numbers will be infinitely smaller, there are definitely people who take great pride in lending a hand for these types of projects.

The other great part about crowdsourcing tasks like this is that companies can build a tighter community throughout the process, which makes rolling out the app in new languages easier, since there are already pockets of fanbases ready to embrace it.

There’s no shortage of apps that let you chat with your friends on mobile devices. There’s apps like GroupMe, WhatsApp, Kakao Talk, that appeal to people who want to talk to their friends outside of a normal text message.

The feature sets of these apps are pretty common, they include; group chat, emoticons, Facebook integration, custom themes, and even your own phone number. One thing they all missed the boat on was translation. It seems like an obvious feature, but it’s not something that we’ve seen until now.

TransFire is an instant messaging app that translates conversations in real-time using Google Translate‘s API. If you have friends all over the globe who might speak different languages than you, this iOS app is a no-brainer to download.

Translation station

Even though Google Translate will work on your Chrome browser, the real-time chat capabilities that TransFire opens up make the technology way more useful. Google’s own chat product, Google Talk, allows you to add translation bots to your contacts that will assist with chat translation, but I think a more native experience like the one TransFire offers is the way to go.

You can log into the app with your Facebook account and it will look for friends that have installed it. TransFire will also scan your address book for friends with the app.

While this app isn’t the prettiest chat app on the market, the utility it provides far surpasses what it lacks in eye-catching design. Since it uses Google Translate, TransFire will translate your chats into over 50 languages.

If you work with someone from another country, or if your friends prefer to speak in their native language online, this app is perfect to keep a fluid conversation going. The other nice part about the app is that it doubles as a standalone translation tool, and gives you the ability to share your translated text on Facebook, Twitter, SMS, or email.

If you can look past the lackluster design, which isn’t too horrific, this app can save you a lot of time when you’re just trying to carry out a normal conversation with someone who speaks a different language than you do. One thing the app is lacking is open chatrooms for people to communicate all over the globe. I think it would be an awesome way to meet people from different countries if you could understand what they’re saying 100% of the time. Perhaps this is something that TransFire will offer in the future.

➤ TransFire

In a study carried out by Italian company Translated.net, websites using Simplified Chinese script, the version used in Singapore and Mainland China show that Chinese speaking netizens rank second in their online buying power.

The study, called the T-index 2010 attempts to quantify the gross domestic product and the online populations of regions and countries to enable e-commerce operators to make educated decisions about which languages they should be choosing to localise their sites.

According to Translated:

T-Index is a statistical index developed by Translated. It is a percentage value that indicates the market share of each language on the Internet and the languages that offer the best sales potential when translating your website.

E-commerce sites based in Singapore and China account for 11% of their index, second only to English with 34.5%.  Japanese is in fourth place with 7% and Korean creeps in at number ten with just under 2.5%.

While Translated are obviously using this study to market their own translation services, it still gives a clear indication of the growing power of the asian online consumer with the region accounting for almost 25% of the localised e-commerce market.  A number that must be significantly higher if you include English language sites in the equation.

You can see the full index in English here and in Chinese here.