Google Unveils Plans to Translate Local News at Search On 22 Conference

Beginning 2023, Google Search users will be able to find global news stories in their preferred language — no matter the country of origin.

Speaking at the company’s annual Search On event on September 28, 2022, Prabhakar Raghavan, SVP at Google, said, “With machine translation, we’re working to surface news results in different languages so you’ll be able to see translated headlines and important global events alongside ones written in your preferred language.”

Raghavan further explained, “For example, say you want to learn more about that awful earthquake in Mexico earlier this month. If your preferred language is English, you’ll get news results from outlets published in English. With this, you get a local, on-the-ground perspective of the earthquake directly from the source.”

Right now, Google Search users have to rely on whatever translation plug-ins their local browser has to find the news; or news aggregators that (maybe) publish machine-translated content in one’s preferred language.

Crucially, if the news is originally in a language — say, local reports in German — other than the one a user types into the browser window, then the search generally remains blind to news in that language.

According to Raghavan, initial rollout in early 2023 will cover French, German, and Spanish news results translated into English.