Legal Research

"Search Google in Two Languages on One Screen"

Posted by Tara Calishain: "Do you ever use Google to do searching in multiple languages? You'll like this site. 2lingual, at http://2lingual.com/ has a front page with two search boxes. Choose the language you want to search in from the drop-down boxes and start typing your query in the left box.

As you type, your search results will appear, refreshing as you complete the query. The right box will translate your query and provide its own set of results in the language you chose. For example, if you do a search in the left box for the word "human" and you have the right search box set to German, it'll translate your word human into Menschen and do a search for that. Each set of search results has its own result count.

Occasionally this got funky. I did a search for the English word tot and chose a German translation. I didn't get one; instead I got German search results for the word "tot" -- which absolutely doesn't mean child. Adding additional words didn't help -- the other words were translated into German while tot remained tot.

On the other hand 2lingual didn't have a problem with the search hell -- which I believe means "light" in German. It was translated to Hölle. Maybe 2lingual only fumbles on words it can't find a translation for.

As you might imagine this is machine translation, which does have its occasional problems (see above) but other than that I thought this was a handy little tool for doing quick two-language searches or even tweaking searches to see how they appear in different languages. And it covers a wide range of languages, too -- everything from Albanian to Vietnamese."

The active link is available at the source site listed below.

Full post as published by Stark County Law Library Blawg on July 20, 2009 (boomark / email).