I’ll admit it. I’m a bit of a spreadsheet snob. In almost every way, Microsoft Excel is a superior product to Google Sheets. But Google Sheets has a pretty cool feature around language translation that Excel currently doesn’t even come close to.
Google Translate Function
Google Sheets has a function called GOOGLETRANSLATE, and it’s pretty simple. You provide the function with the text you want to translate, the language that the original text is in, and the language that you want to translate the text into (see below for a list of language codes).
Uses
Clearly if you want to simply translate a phrase or email, pulling up a spreadsheet doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. However, if you have a long list of individual words you want to translate (say to make flash cards or try and learn key terms for an upcoming trip), a spreadsheet is a great way to organize this data.
Another use might be to translate one word quickly into several languages. Below shows a table with that references the target word (water in this case) and then translates it into many languages:
Detect Language
If you’re not sure what language a certain word or phrase is in, you can type “auto” into the source_language field and Google Translate will try to figure out what language it was in. You can also type “auto” into the target_language field and it will rely on your system default language.
Alternatively, you can also find out the language by using another function, DETECTLANGUAGE. For this function, you just need to reference the text and it will return the ISO code for the language.
Language Codes
The language source and target language criteria is based on the ISO code for languages. Below is a table for many of the languages that you can use with this function: