How to Create a Google Spreadsheet for Automatic Translation

Just as we’ve been introducing you to tricks for Microsoft Word for days now, today it’s time to show you the new features of Google. Particularly from its Google Sheets tool. It is an open source version of Google that competes with Excel.

With Google Sheets (or Google Spreadsheets) we can do just about anything if we have the right formula. And translating texts is one of the things that this tool can do if we follow this simple guide that we bring to you today.

Without further ado, grab a pen and paper and let’s get started. The translation in question will be the most common, from English to Spanish, for all those who want to translate texts in order to understand them.

• Open Google Spreadsheet.
• Enter any word in a cellwe chose to write “cat” (Spanish for gato) in cell A1.

• Currently, click on another cell, B2 in this example.
• Next, enter ‘=googletranslate’. As soon as you start typing, “googletranslate” will automatically appear in the drop-down menu. Instead of typing, you can also click the Features icon in the toolbar and select Google > Google Translate from the drop-down menu.

• Click on google translator. Code (text, [idioma_origen], [idioma_destino]).
• For text, select the cell with the word you want to translate. For example, A1. You can also click on this cell and the program will write it for you.

• Per [source_language]select the language of the word you wrote. If you want to translate the word “cat”, you must write “en” (for English). This step is usually done automatically though, so don’t worry.
• AT [target_language]select the language you want to translate into. For example, you can write “es” for Spanish or “it” for Italian. Remember to always enclose language codes in quotation marks. Otherwise, you will get an error in your code.
• press Enteryou should see the translation of the original word.

And that’s it, it’s that simple. Between the tutorial and the screenshots, this tutorial is one of the easiest we’ve come up with to date, and that’s because Google has integrated almost all of its tools into its apps, just like with Google Translate.