Hooray! ?????

I am a fan of a new 20% project Google has rolled out: translation bots in Google Chat. Add a specific e-mail address to your buddy list (my bot of choice is en2ja@bot.talk.google.com) and if you send it a message, it will spit back a translation. This is a lot faster than Babelfish and what have you, and you can have a group chat open with multiple translation bots. This is hard to explain, but check the link and look at the screenshot.

This is a fantastic resource for anyone trying to learn a new language. As my interest in Japanese has recently been re-piqued, I think I’m going to be having a lot of chats with en2ja in the future.