Leslie Forman
November 28, 2011 — By Leslie Forman

How to Use Google Alerts and Gmail’s Google Translate Plugin to Turbo-Charge Your Multilingual Research

Over time I’ve learned several super-convenient Internet tricks. This is the first post in an occasional series. A quick overview of this long, detailed (and useful, I hope) post: Use Google Alerts to monitor your favorite topics. If your topic is international in scope, set up Alerts in multiple languages. Add the Google Translate plugin […]

Over time I’ve learned several super-convenient Internet tricks. This is the first post in an occasional series.

A quick overview of this long, detailed (and useful, I hope) post:

  1. Use Google Alerts to monitor your favorite topics.
  2. If your topic is international in scope, set up Alerts in multiple languages.
  3. Add the Google Translate plugin to your Gmail for easy skimming.
  4. Set up automatic message filtering, to keep your Inbox relatively clear.

I think Google Alerts are absolutely the most useful Internet research tool. Here’s how they work, straight from the Google Alerts homepage:

Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic.
Enter the topic you wish to monitor, then click preview to see the type of results you’ll receive. Some handy uses of Google Alerts include:

  • monitoring a developing news story
  • keeping current on a competitor or industry
  • getting the latest on a celebrity or event
  • keeping tabs on your favorite sports teams

I wrote a detailed post about How I Use Google Alerts to Follow Niche News in China. My friend Jaclyn Schiff wrote this useful post with tricks for finding niche news from big news sites: How to Get the News You Really Want Delivered to Your Inbox.

Now I use Google Alerts to follow the latest developments in renewable energy in Chile.

My initial Alerts sent me articles in English. These were useful, but they didn’t seem to tell the whole story. I needed to set Alerts in Spanish. But how?

Felipe to the rescue! He suggested that I use http://www.google.cl/alerts to set localized alerts on the same terms. Thank you Felipe!

 

Now I subscribe to Google Alerts and Alertas de Google for my keywords.

HidroAysén is a controversial system of mega-dams planned for a picturesque area in Patagonia, southern Chile.

Google Alerts sends me updates like this one:

I clicked through and found Hydroelectric Dams Proposed in Patagonia Meet Fierce Resistance, a crowdfunding pitch from a young American travel writer named Susan Munroe, who is researching the HidroAysén debate. When I saw that Susan was researching the same topic as me, and she looked like a nice and adventurous person, I emailed her. We met up and talked about HidroAysén, then she baked a delicious apple cobbler for our Thanksgiving celebration. Apple cobbler: unexpected perk of Google Alerts!

Alertas de Google sends me different coverage of this same topic:

A tribunal has accused HidroAysén Executive Vice President Daniel Fernández of going against the principles of a political party. A TV program about another controversial energy project in the south of Chile, Isla Riesco, drove the local Twittersphere wild. The Presidential Energy Commission says that conclusions are being made based on biased information.

These news stories are far more specific and more up-to-the minute than the information I can gather from Google Alerts in English.

I bet the same trick would work in French, German, and other languages. Let me know if you try using it for other languages.

 

In the Alerta de Google screenshot, did you see the Spanish > English translation button?

It’s a new and glorious addition to my Gmail account. (I can read Spanish, but I read faster in English, and since this post is about turbo-charged research tools I think you should know about it!) I followed this instructions in this Mashable post to install it. Here’s how the Official Google Blog described the feature when it was added to Gmail labs in 2009.

Simply enable “Message Translation” from the Labs tab under Settings, and when you receive an email in a language other than your own, Gmail will help you translate it into a language you can understand. In one click.


If all parties are using Gmail, you can have entire conversations in multiple languages with each participant reading the messages in whatever language is most comfortable for them. It’s not quite the universal translators we’re so fond of from science fiction, but thanks to Google Translate, it’s an exciting step in the right direction. I use this feature everyday to help me work with teammates around the globe (they think my Japanese is much better than it really is…shhhh!).

If you use Google Alerts as much as I do, your Inbox will be packed with automated messages. But this is easy to solve!

 

Create an automatic filtering system. Here’s how mine works.

When you receive an email from Google Alerts, first click the Labels drop-down menu and make one called Google Alerts. click the More tab. Scroll down to filter messages like these.

At this point, you will see a window that lets you define the types of messages to filter. For automated messages like Google Alerts, I find that it works best to use the From address as the main filter: googlealerts-noreply@google.com

Then click Next and in the following screen choose these options: Skip the Inbox + Apply the Label “Google Alerts.”

Repeat the filtering steps for each language of Google Alerts. You may want to do it for blogs, mailing lists, and clients too!

These tools have helped me efficiently filter through an enormous amount of information. I hope they’re helpful!

If you have anything to add, please do so in the comments below.

Happy researching!