Google Talk, the company’s messaging service, has just released a real time translation service in 23 languages. The translation is done by bots who are invited to the participant’s chat session. The service is said to be reasonably accurate, given the limits of machine translation. They even get swearing right.

An increasingly globalized world brings the need for people to understand each other in order to travel, do business and learn. However, as I have written before, the internet is not yet particularly friendly to speakers of languages outside of English, Chinese and maybe Spanish. Although millions of people are learning English, it seems that the bots are going to learn a lot faster. The technology has come a long way since its inception in the 50s. A freely translatable internet would go a long way in bridging the digital divide.