Google puts pressure on interpreting industry?

A new addition to Google Talk may seem as if it’s adding pressure to the translation and interpretation sector, but we’re not worried just yet.

Google Talk is a new centralized telephone and voice-mail service offered by Google, which offers users free calls and SMS texts within the U.S. and international calls at low rates, in addition to routing business and personal calls via a single phone number. The new addition to this service is a translation component.

Just like Google Translate, Google Talk’s new translation feature uses machine translation. It offers certain language pairings (German to French, Korean to English, etc.) to help you translate your transcribed voice messages, chats, and text messages.

By adding a language “bot” to your contact list, you can translate phrases nearly simultaneously. However, the system does employ machine translation, which has proven to be inaccurate at times. But this could be fun to play with anyway!

Google offers the use of 25 language bots: Click here for a list of available bots.

What are your thoughts? Let us know in a comment!