Google Notebook goes multi-lingual

Posted by Xiangtian Dai, Software Engineer

I can read English. If you're reading this blog post, you probably can too. But if you're like me—someone who is not one of the 300 or 400 million native English speakers in a world of more than 6 billion people—you might be more comfortable on using your own language for personal activities. I know I am, and I can still remember the days 16 years ago when my dad and I were tweaking the home PC-XT to make a database application work in Chinese instead of in English. Now being a software engineer myself working in this great company whose products are used by people around the world, I would almost feel guilty if my product doesn't speak in the same language as you do.

Fortunately, my feeling of guilt is coming to an end. When we released the Google Notebook in its shiny, fresh new look, we also made it speak 17 other languages besides English. We have German, Polish, Turkish—to name a few—and of course Chinese. Admittedly, there is still a long way to go for us to reach everyone in the world in all the thousands of languages. Rest assured, though, that just because your language isn't one of the first doesn't mean that we have forgotten you.

In case you haven't heard about it before, Google Notebook lets you conveniently collect, organize and share information while searching and browsing the web. If you've tried it already, I urge you to try again, as its new interface is much smoother to use than it was—and I'm not saying that just because I'm looking at it in Chinese.