Have you ever tried to communicate with another person whose first language isn't English? (This isn't an immigration blog and we're not going down that path.) Whether you are trying to complete a business deal, increase your friendship or have just been caught in the middle of a foreign thread, it can become very hard to communicate if not everyone is on the same vocabulary plane.



Search engines have been aware of language barriers for a decade. They constantly deal with these types of questions: what happens when you search a song or a movie title in another language? In what language should the results be shown? What if the name is Italian, for example, but the web content is in English?

Strides have been made in an attempt to solve the translation problems. The web crawler may ask, "This page is in German, would you like it translated?" Or you can copy and paste with Google Translate and other similar programs.

Now, Google is giving even more language options.

"But in what I imagine is something of a speech recognition breakthrough, Google's search app can now understand commands and queries in multiple languages simultaneously," reported Greg Sterling.

So if you have a friend in, let's say, Mexico, and you find them speaking "Spanglish" a lot, no problem, Google can understand the message and convey it in a more succinct manner.