In-depth Review of Google Wave Translation Bots

We’ve talked before about how to use the Aunt Rosy bot to translate your waves into another language. Truth be told, Aunt Rosy is not the only translation bot out right now. I also don’t know what everyone else’s experiences with Aunt Rosy are, but I’ve experienced some problems with it glitching and then filling up the wave with a bunch of repeated translations. So I thought we’d review a couple other translation bots for Google wave and see what they have to offer too: Translatey and Multilingual.

Aunt Rosie translation bot

Because I already explained how to use Aunt Rosie in another post, I’ll be brief here. It seems like Aunt Rosie is one of the most popular translation bots used right now. Unlike some other translation bots, Aunt Rosie gives you the ability to translate in realtime. Your words are translated as you type them underneath your blip.

My own experience with using it has been fairly negative. One, it seems to slow down the wave even more so once the wave grows in size. Also, sometimes I’ve used Aunt Rosie and had my translation appear 30+ times below the blip. I don’t know if the creator of this app has fixed this problem or if it’s a problem on my end. I’m not sure what causes it. Sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn’t.

“Translatey” Translation Bot

Translatey will translate your text from any language to the language you choose. You can add the Translatey bot to a wave by adding “translatey@appspot.com” as a participant to the wave. Once you do, a blip will appear with some instructions.

I responded to the blip with “/?” to get help. A list of language codes came up. You’ll see that each language is represented with a two character language code (e.g. Spanish = “es”).

I responded to this blip with “es” to designate that I want to translate into Spanish. This will translate any language I type in (English, German, French, etc.).

The cool thing about Translatey is that it automatically detects what language you are typing in. Another potential plus for some users is that later on you can change the language you want to translate into by just entering a new language code in a replying blip. For example, you could translate one blip into Dutch and then translate another blip into French.

One downside to some might be the fact that it doesn’t translate in realtime. In order for it to translate a blip, you must write the blip and then hit the hotkey “Shift + Enter” or hit the “Done” button. Then, a replying blip will translate the language.

“Multilingual” Translation Bot

The Multilingual translation bot works similarly to Translatey, but I found it has quite a few more options. You can add the Multilingual bot to a wave by adding “multilingual@appspot.com” as a participant to a wave. Once you do, a blip will appear with some not-so-helpful information.

If you reply to this blip by just typing in “/help” another blip will pop up with some helpful instructions.

You’ll notice with Multilingual you’ll have a lot more command options:

# Type /version to show the last version of Multilingual Bot

# Type /userlist to show registered user

# Type /lang_id /lang_id anywhere, your text will be translated to selected language, example: /en /de your text

# Type /notranslate anywhere, the bot will not translate your text

# Type lang_id to register your language, example for english: en

# Or just type your text, your language will be detected and translated to all registered language

Multilingual works a little bit differently. Rather than selecting a language to translate into, Multilingual automatically detects the language you are typing in and then will translate that into the registered language of each participant in the wave.

For example, if I register my language as English by typing in an empty blip “en,” the message of someone who types something in Spanish (or any other language) will be translated to me into English because that’s my registered language. If someone’s registered language was German, that message in Spanish would be translated to them in German.

This is an excellent feature that can be utilized multi-language waves. Hence the name: “Multilingual.”

Conclusion

Out of these three translation bots, I’ve had the best experience with Multilingual. I was a bit confused at first with the initial Multilingual blip that comes up, but simply typing in “/help” really, well, helps. I like the simplicity of it (e.g. not translating in realtime) and I also like the added options and commands that come with it. It’s also pretty nifty how it’ll automatically detect the language being typed and translate that to participants in the wave depending upon their registered language.

Have you tried these translation bots? Which one is your favorite to use?