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One week ago, we reported about how Google added new features to its translation service, like new languages and language detection, but back then it still had not even been announced by Google yet. The day for that has come, though, and that day is today.

Google now officially announces the addition of 10 new languages to its translation service, including Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Hindi, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian and Swedish. Also, as noted in our earlier post, there is a new feature called “Detect Language” that saves you from having to figure out the language of origin of the text or web page you’re translating. Certainly adds convenience to the service, much more than anything else.

Head on over to the official Google Blog for the details.

Read [Official Google Blog]

If you’ve been monitoring news in another language like I’ve been doing this morning, you might have also noticed that the homepage of Google’s Translation service has undergone a bit of a makeover. And if you mess around with it a little you’ll find a few new features that haven’t even been announced by Google yet.

In addition to the thirteen languages that Google Translate already supports, it now offers translations for eleven new languages, which are Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Hindi, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Russian and Swedish. So now you can translate text and web pages in 25 languages, plus there’s a cool new feature that lets you translate something even if you don’t know the language of origin. It’s called Detect Language, and lets you translate text and web pages without asking you for the original language you are trying to translate from. It’s a godsend for people like me who don’t know their Simplified Chinese from the Traditional, and I’m sure a lot of other people are going to like this new feature as well.

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Flickr figured it’s about time we found out who among our friends also keep online photo albums. If you’d like an easy way to search for people you know on Flickr’s user base, you can do so now with a convenient, and aptly titled Find Your Friends Feature. All you have to do is access the Find Your Friends page while logged in, and Flickr will access your address book for you and automagically bring you a list of users with email addresses matching those in your address book. This isn’t new, but still a great feature especially for those who have at least a few hundred people in email address books.

Read [Flickr Blog]

Google has announced that it will be rolling out new Gmail features to Google Apps users soon, following the Gmail’s recent codebase revamp. The new features include an even faster interface, group chat from the browser, streamlined contact manager, colored message labels, improved keyboard shortcuts, and bookmarkable messages and searches. I’m a Google Apps user myself but I don’t know if I should feel excited about this or not. I know none of the keyboard shortcuts except that to send an email quickly, you press the CTRL and ENTER button simultaneously (although I haven’t even tried that in a while so I’m not completely sure about that), I don’t use labels, I chat using YM, and I thought the interface was supposed to be fast anyway. And I’ve set up my Google Apps account to activate new features immediately once they become available to users. So I don’t know if I’ve already been using the new features or not. Either way, if you’re a Google Apps user too, this is great news for you. At least it’s supposed to be.

Via [Official Gmail Blog]

You might not notice but YouTube has actually updated its embedded video players and added a few minor tweaks. I’m not sure if this feature was active in the old YouTube video player but the new one is now blatantly supporting keyboard shortcuts, including: space bar to pause the video and then resume it, right arrow to fast forward, left arrow to rewind/replay the video, and the up/down arrows to adjust volume. The overlayed YouTube logo from the old video player was also moved to the lower right corner of the player to replace the Menu button with essentially unchanged features (shows related videos and embed code when clicked). Not exactly the live video streaming option everyone was debating about recently, but still a cool update to the world’s coolest online video site.

Via [Google Operating System]