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Gabbing globally a la Google

Jon Skillings Editorial director
Jon Skillings is an editorial director at CNET, where he's worked since 2000. A born browser of dictionaries, he honed his language skills as a US Army linguist (Polish and German) before diving into editing for tech publications -- including at PC Week and the IDG News Service -- back when the web was just getting under way, and even a little before. For CNET, he's written on topics from GPS, AI and 5G to James Bond, aircraft, astronauts, brass instruments and music streaming services.
Expertise AI, tech, language, grammar, writing, editing Credentials
  • 30 years experience at tech and consumer publications, print and online. Five years in the US Army as a translator (German and Polish).
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Jon Skillings

Google got a lot of press last week for a bevy of new initiatives, including maps that show satellite images of the street where you live to Larry Page's revelation that the company would soon begin an "experiment in video blogging."

One new upgrade, however, debuted without much notice--except among the wordies of the world: Google Definitions has gone multilingual. It's not clear exactly how many languages the service offers--at the very least, a quick passeggiata shows, they include English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian and Chinese.

One German-English translator was quick to put the service to the test, trying it out on a central word from Bavarian culture, "bratwurst." She learned a couple of things. One, you cook up different results using the string "define bratwurst" (space, no punctuation) than "define:bratwurst" (no space, colon) and two, you can fry your assumptions about a word's origin.