If you’re like me, there are certain software products you use every single day.  If you’re even more like me, you start to have certain ideas; ideas about how that software could be friendlier to the user. Some of these ideas are more obvious than others, but what’s truly baffling is when an already-implemented feature remains unavailable to its relevant use cases - which brings me to Google Language Tools (the lower link to the immediate right of the Google search textbox).

A few months ago, after enough assorted brilliant ideas for application and OS workflow improvements had accumulated to warrant a quick post about them  (“a short wish list”), we wrote: “wouldn’t it be cool if Google Language was smart enough to detect the source language and pre-select it (or at least make a good guess)?”
Well, Google Language Tools still doesn’t include this admittedly small but user-friendly feature.  However, it was recently pointed out to us by an astute reader that Google Translate has exactly this feature (see below). Upon further research, it turns out it’s been there since May of 2008, and the mobile Google Language page has it as well…

Google Translate is the web service-based incarnation of their Language Tools, and is designed to be “mashed” into other websites. There are still a lot more people using Google on computers than smartphones. All of which begs the question: why does this cool little feature show up on a web service where it’s arguably less needed (since the language of any given website is of course not a mystery to the publisher and remains static) - and not out there on the main Google Search/Language Tools page, where millions of us web-surfing humans are visiting sites in multiple and different source languages all the time?

A Mountain View mystery.  Meanwhile, try out the Google Translate web service below - now you can read digitalmissive in Belarusan if you want to - pretty nifty…