In this case, it was two children in different countries, using a Google Sheet to communicate with each other. This is a nice example where two people can have a conversation, despite not knowing each other’s language. So, as you can see it needs to be used with care, but this can also be used as a discussion point with your students.Įxample 5 – Having a conversation where neither person speaks the others language The last one, should translate as “hacer turismo”, as it’s come up with a translation that says “to go and see landscapes”. The individual words are ok, but the last two phrases aren’t what I wanted.įor example, “to have a coffee” is “tomar un café” but it could be with the word “para”, if I say, “I went to the bar to have a coffee”. If you know some Spanish, you will notice that in fact some of the translations aren’t that good, or at least will depend on the situation. = iferror ( GOOGLETRANSLATE ( A2, “en”, “es” ), “” ) In cell C2 I’ve written the formula that has been used. In cell A2 and I have the problem reported by the teacher in English, then the translation will appear in cell B2. To show this, let’s look at a simple example below. To do this, I used the GOOGLETRANSLATE function. We’re in Seville, Spain, and some teachers can’t speak Spanish very well, so I needed a system that would allow them to report the problems in English and then it would translate it into Spanish, so that the maintenance and IT guys, who don’t speak English, can understand the problems and act on them.

I created a system where I work, where teachers can report problems in their classrooms via Google Forms on their mobiles. So, in this post we’re going to look at the functions GOOGLETRANSLATE and DETECTLANGUAGE and you’ll see how easy these are to use.Įxample 1 – Translating from one language to another Lots of people know about and have used Google Translate either on their phones or on the Google website but what they often don’t know is that there is a built-in function in Google Sheets, which will allow you to translate from one language to another, and even automatically recognise the language and translate it.

English to portuguese google translate