Google has brought seven new languages to its Google Translate service. This ups the total number of languages to 41.
These added languages will ease communication difficulties for at least 151 million people.
According to the company, Albanian (9-13 million speakers), Estonian (1.1 million speakers), Galician (3-4 million speakers), Hungarian (15 million speakers), Maltese (around 400,000 speakers), Thai (60-65 million speakers), and Turkish (63 million speakers) have been added.
The company also announced that its English dictionary has been improved to “include synonyms, antonyms, pronunciations, detailed definitions, and examples from Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner’s English Dictionary.”
All its new features are available now.
Yesterday, Google launched offline support for Gmail, a feature that’s been long anticipated by the service’s users. The feature is being gradually rolled out to UK and U.S. users and will be available via the Labs area of Gmail’s Settings page.
Using Google’s Gears platform, the new capability enables users to maintain a local cache of messages which is kept synchronised with Gmail’s servers when and if connectivity becomes available. Features include the ability to read, star and label messages as well as queue messages to be sent from the user’s outbox. Google’s claiming they’re able to provide a near-live representation of the service when in offline mode.
Gmail has long offered offline support through standards-based POP and IMAP interfaces, enabling users to wire their Gmail to their email client of choice. What Google is promising is the ability to work in the same environment and with the same features, both offline and online, a precedent that casts some doubt over the usefulness of rich Internet clients, such as those built on Adobe AIR.
Interestingly, buried in today’s news was the announcement that, Hotmail is finally adding POP3 support - ELEVEN YEARS after Microsoft acquired the service!
Does Microsoft really think adding POP3 is considered progress?
