Translate Cells in Google Spreadsheets with this Function

Google Docs now includes some new functions to help you translate individual cells in a spreadsheet from one language to another or for detecting what language is being used in a particular spreadsheet cell.

translate spreadsheet cells

The syntax is easy:

\=GoogleTranslate(“text”, “source language”,“target language”)

So if you would like to translate the text contents of cell A1 from English to Arabic, you can use the following translate function.

\=GoogleTranslate(A1, “en”, “ar”)

If you leave out the target language (in this case, “ar”) from the function, the GoogleTranslate function will automatically convert that text into the default language of your spreadsheet.

Use GoogleTranslate with ImportFeed Function

Here’s a short screencast animation that demonstrates how you can use the Google Translation function inside a spreadsheet (with ImportFeed) to read foreign language feeds in your own language.

In this case, we translated the feed titles from English to French but you can use just about any language pair supported in Google Translation.

translation in google docs

Amit Agarwal

Amit Agarwal

Google Developer Expert, Google Cloud Champion

Amit Agarwal is a Google Developer Expert in Google Workspace and Google Apps Script. He holds an engineering degree in Computer Science (I.I.T.) and is the first professional blogger in India.

Amit has developed several popular Google add-ons including Mail Merge for Gmail and Document Studio. Read more on Lifehacker and YourStory

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