Nearly every startup has a lofty mission statement and a plan to change the world. Google may have their detractors, but no one can deny that they're passionately striving to deliver on their mission statement:
Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.
First that seemed to mean organizing online information in their search index and making it universally accessible via their innovative algorithms. It quickly became apparent that Google takes their mission statement a little more seriously than that. Their offering expanded to include indexing online images and capturing satellite images and making them available online. Along the way they quietly added various specialty searches like U.S. government sites, scholarly papers, programming code. Blog search, book search and street search where you could have a street-level view of addresses -- and walk down the street, viewing the buildings and people unlucky enough to be there when the photo was taken -- as if you were there.
It became clear that Google wanted to get as much information online as possible and make it easily accessible via search. But that wasn't universal enough. When Google said universal, they meant it. And the only way to do that is to make it not only available to everyone, but intelligible for everyone. The only way to do that is to make all the information available in all languages.
Their first step in this direction came in the form of Google Translate -- to which they've added languages over time. Next came Translated Search, which let's you enter search terms in your language and have results displayed side by side in your language and the target language of your choice. I only discovered today that they've now added a dictionary that let's you look up the definitions of words in a number of languages, as well as look up foreign language translations of words between 12 different languages.
The rate at which Google continues to innovate and introduce new products to the market doesn't seem to be slowing. As someone who has spent almost my entire professional career working in multilingual environments and managing teams that span the globe, I find it incredibly exciting.
The Internet lets you connect with people around the world, but in practice you’re really limited to the people with whom you share a common language. What if you could e-mail anyone in their native tongue? What if you could even talk to them in their native language, your voice translated in real time into Vietnamese, Arabic or Swahili? “It’s possible,” Nikesh Arora, Google senior vice president for operations in the Europe, Middle East and Africa, told participants at the Monaco Media Forum.
During a presentation in which he examined some of the big Internet trends of the next decade, Arora demonstrated a new version of Google Talk that allows real-time conversations with somebody who speaks a foreign language. You type in English, and the sentence appears in French, German or whatever. The next step, which could come within the next decade, would be simultaneous voice translation.
Thanks to Google's efforts in this area, the Web is not only world wide -- it's increasingly world friendly.
Google Wants to Let You Speak Any Foreign Language--Instantly | Business Week
