Google continues to improve its Gmail by adding new functions that facilitate international communication between users. The company has announced it is rolling out Automatic Message Translation into masses.

Photo: a comics illustrating our caveman ancestors, from gmailblog.blogspot.com

The function that allows immediate translation of emails you receive from any language to your own was initially introduced in Gmail Labs in May 2009. It was available for business users who appreciated it very much, so Google continued to develop it.

Introducing the service, Darren Lewis, Google Software Engineer wrote in a blogpost: “Back in the early days of human existence, before language had fully developed, our caveman ancestors probably did a lot of grunting. Language, and thus life, were pretty simple: watch out for that saber-toothed tiger («Blorg! AIYA!!!»); stop riding the wooly mammoth and help me pick some berries («Argh. Zagle zorg!»); man, it’s cold in this Ice Age («Brrrr.»).

Somewhere along the line, all those grunts diverged into thousands of distinct languages, and life became both richer and more complicated. And for the last few eons or so, we’ve struggled to communicate in a multilingual world.”

The service is easy to use. When you receive an email in a foreign language you don’t know, you should just click the ‘Translate message’ button on the header of the email and the text will be translated. In case you know this or that language, you can turn off the feature.

Additionally, Google has changed the text in the browser tab for users to more easily see if they have new messages and made improvements to the Smart Mute function to help users avoid noisy email threads.

Last month, Google also unveiled Google Drive, its own cloud service.