Google Translate‘s coverage has been expanded dramatically. It now supports the translation between any of the following languages: English, Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish (the new languages are shown in bold). From 26 language pairs, Google Translate now supports 506 language pairs and becomes the most comprehensive online translation tool available for free.

The most useful feature of the new Google Translate is the automatic language detection feature. You no longer have to select the language of a web page in order to translate it to English. Just choose “Detect language” and Google will attempt to figure out the source language for you and translate the page or text to the language of your choice.

The automatic translation is far from perfect, but is definetly an ecvellent start which, knowing Google will improve fast over time.