I noticed today that Outlook India have a Google Translate feature on their article pages. It’s the first instance I’ve seen of the Translate tool being used on a major publisher’s website. I gave it a go and it’s pretty slick. You can see an example on this page about how the ancestral homes of legendary Bollywood actors are being conserved in Peshawar, Pakistan, where they were once part of India, pre-Partition.

The tool is at the bottom of the article — it’s a select box. You can currently select one of 52 languages to translate into. Selecting a different language serializes and urlencodes all the elements on the page and POSTs them to the translate.googleapis.com service. They are returned, translated, in a JSON response along with the original English, which is used in popup boxes when you hover over a section of the newly translated text. Everything is translated, not just the main content — including all the form controls, menus and even any comments on the page — and the page design and structure is respected.

A toolbar is added to the top of the viewport so you can select a new language or revert back to the original. The speed of a translation seems to vary somewhat — I tried Hindi, which was very quick, and Irish, which was relatively slow — but a progress indicator let’s you know how much time you will be waiting. Overall the effect is deeply impressive and the function has a high level of polish, something that Google has not always been able to provide.

I first saw Google’s translation technology early in 2009. Back then it seemed an awkward fit for in-place translating and more suited to a post-and-response web service. But this is certainly a feature that more publishers, large and small, should be including on their sites.

Outlook India is a fine magazine which I wholeheartedly recommend. Most of their published content is available on the website as well as web-only content. They have an extensive series of essays by the author and activist Arundhati Roy.