The Google Talk team has released a bunch of translation bots that you can add to your instant messenger and chat with them to get translations. You can use this service as an interpreter if you are chatting with a foreigner through group chat or as a handy pocket translator in Google Talk client for Mobile devices. The service should be compatible with any XMPP-compatible IM network.

Currently, there are twenty three translation bots available for different language pairs. They’re named using two-letter language abbreviations such as “[from language]2[to language]@bot.talk.google.com”. The supported language pairs are: ar2en, de2en, de2fr, el2en, en2ar, en2de, en2el, en2es, en2fr, en2it, en2ja, en2ko, en2nl, en2ru, en2zh, es2en, fr2de, fr2en, it2en, ja2en, ko2en, nl2en, ru2en, zh2en.

You can simply add one of these bots to your contact list, open a chat with it, and then whenever you type something in the “source” language, the bot will repeat the same in “to” language.

This is a 20% project, hence the machine translated results may not be outstanding.