PowerSearchingWithGoogle.com

Lesson 4.5: Limiting results by region or language

Contents:

Using Advanced Search to limit results to a particular region or language.
How to translate pages to English or toggle back to original language
Using Google Translate for written and verbal translations

In Lesson 4.5 we're going to talk about the World Wide Web, and I mean the World Wide Web because the World Wide Web is really international and many pages are written in languages other than yours. So from my perspective as an English speaker I might want to figure out how I can search for pages in other languages and then read them in a way that makes sense to me, that's what this lesson is all about. So suppose I do a search like this for a euro zone and I'm curious about what say Spanish speakers would be thinking and saying and writing about the euro zone; how would I get that?

Here's the answer, by using advanced search. You click on Settings, go to Advanced search like that, click there and it brings up the Advanced Search page user interface.

Now as you can see there are a lot of options here. The ones we want to focus on is this right here, the language selector.

If I click on any language it pops up a list of a lot of different languages: Finnish, Greek, Hebrew, Portuguese, in this case I want Spanish. Click on Spanish and then do my search and what I get now are pages that are written in Spanish that have been returned as the search results. Now there are a couple things you can do once you've got this. Suppose I don't read Spanish, I can click on this link right here to translate that page and this is taking me to a translated version of the Wikipedia article on the Eurozone, fantastic.

But suppose I've got a page like say this one right here which is coming from a Spanish website, now you can see I've set this to be automatically translated, but I can now go back and click on this button and see the original so I go back and forth between the English version and the Spanish version. One way to do that is to use this tool up in the upper right corner of the browser bar and that allows you to toggle back and forth.

If I click on that tool, it gives me that option to see the original or see the translation, so in this case I've got it in Spanish. I can now click here to see in English. Okay that makes sense, so you have multiple ways to translate. I can click on the menu item in the search result page or I can go to the page itself and use Chrome to invoke the Google Translation function. Now one thing you can also do, let’s do that search again, eurozone so here we are in eurozone and I can now go back to advanced search and this time I want to say search by Spanish again, but I want to limit it this time to results from a particular region.

In this case I'm going to choose Mexico because Mexico might have a different opinion than say Spain which is part of the Eurozone, so I scroll down on it, get to Mexico, so let's switch that, click on Advanced Search and now I've got a different set of results because these are results in Spanish coming from a Mexican website, okay fantastic.

Now let's do one more example here. Suppose I want understand something about river dolphins, those beautiful pink dolphins that swim in the Amazon and here my results are all in English great but what do the Brazilians think about the river dolphins? Now as you know the language of Brazil is Portuguese so let's do that trick and say Settings, Advanced search.

I want to see river dolphin in any language in this case I'm going to do Portuguese, right, great I'll say Brazil because I'm curious about what the Brazilians think about this.

And now I've got results about the river dolphin in Portuguese in Brazil.

Wait, if you’re a Portuguese speaker in Brazil, would you call it river dolphin? Probably not, so how would we translate this? Let me open a new tab, I'm going to do a search for Google Translate. This brings up the Google translation option and I can type in in this case river dolphin on the left hand side and I've got Portuguese selected on the right and now I see they don't call it a river dolphin they call it a golfinho do rio or if I want to really get that, I'm going to copy that, I can actually click this button here to hear it. (Hear golfinho do rio spoken by Portuguese speaker)

So now I've got this copied and I can now go back to my search here, paste that up here.

Do my search now and now I've got Portuguese pages from Brazil using the Portuguese term for river dolphin.

So in this sense I'm getting a lot closer to the original content, the original intent to the content that's produced in the country, in the language of that country. Go ahead and explore with this because it's a great set of tools to use and gives you access to the real World Wide Web.

(Updated 6/2019 A. Awakuni Fernald)