Google has launched its new Google Translate feature that allows non-English speakers to search content from the English web.

The company www.vnunet.com the technology earlier this month at a company event at its corporate headquarters in Mountain View, California. But the search giant at the time didn't provide a projected launch date.

The service currently supports 12 languages including Arabic, Chinese, French and German. Users enter queries in their native tongues, Google performs the search for the English equivalent and presents the user with translated search results. Users clicking on a search result will be guided to a machine translated version of the original page.

A search for the French word 'bistro' (a simple restaurant) for instance yields bar.co.uk as the top result. But demonstrating some of the challenges of machine translations, the second result it a Wikipedia entry on air pressure, which is measured in 'bar' units.

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