In today’s globalized world it is a pretty common occurrence to have to deal with documents in different languages. But since technology is progressing as a fast rate as well, we are usually able to work with those documents even if we don’t speak the language. There are aids that can help us get over the language barrier.
Modern technology enables you to translate foreign text extremely easily and without losing time or decreasing your productivity.
We will show you today how you can work with different languages in Google Spreadsheets.
One of the major advantages of Google Spreadsheets is the ability to integrate it with Google Translate. Google translate is a great tool for translating between almost every major world language.
1. Detect language
Say that you have received spreadsheets in a language you are unfamiliar with and you are not sure what language it is. You can easily solve this problem by using the Detect Language function. This function is: =DetectLanguage(“text”)
For example, if you want to detect a language in cell number A5, you can type: =DetectLanguage(A5)
Google will use a short code to display what language you are working in. For example, English is EN, German is DE, and French is FR. The list of codes is based on ISO standards.
Here is how it looks in an example:
2. Translating Cells
Google Spreadsheet can also translate cells. The function for this is: =GoogleTranslate(“text”, “source language”,”target language”).
For example, if you want to translate text from cell number A5, you would type =GoogleTranslate(A5, “en”, ”ru”)
You can see in this example, how we translated the text from English to Russian:
