Google on Wednesday tackled the Internet language barrier with the launch of a beta translation function that allows users to search foreign language Web sites in their own languages.
The addition to the Google Translate page will provide translations for 12 languages and will provide international web surfers the option to search the dearth of English-language information available on the Internet, according to Google. 
"We think this feature will be particularly useful for our international users since although the majority of the Internet users out there are non-English speakers, a majority of the content on the Internet is still in English," Franz Och, a Google research scientist, wrote in a blog post.
"One of the major problems we have when we look at different languages is that the Web is not as extensive in other languages," said Udi Manber, Google vice president of engineering, at a press event earlier this month. "As good as a search engine is, we can't find something that's not there."
The search engine's new function, however, "can take [the entire] Web and automatically translate it into modern languages," Manber said. It is "a way for you to directly search different languages and get results in different languages. The idea is that you're searching in your own language."
An Arabic speaker looking for New York City restaurant reviews, for example, is likely limited in the number of reviews actually written and posted online in Arabic, Manber said. The Google function, therefore, will allow a user to type in New York City restaurant reviews" in Arabic and receive translated reviews from local outlets like New York Magazine or City Search, he said.
Similarly, an English speaker could search French Web sites for a wine tasting in France and receive English translations, Och said.
Results for a search will pop up on a split screen, with the English results on one side and the machine translated page in the language of your choice on the other side. Results will be available in English, Arabic, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, Korean and traditional and simplified Chinese.
Manber and Och were quick to point out that the service is "not perfect."
If someone wanted to read in-depth articles from a literary magazine, for example, the new function "is probably not the best experience," Manber said. "But if you want information, most of the time, the information is there."
"It's usually good enough for you to obtain the gist of information in a language you might otherwise be unable to access," Och wrote.
A few quick searches, for example, turned up results that were in somewhat garbled English but were basically understandable.
