Introduction
If you work somewhere that does business in other countries or has offices around the world, then you may sometimes receive text in Excel files in foreign languages.
Excel has an inbuilt translator which can show you the text in your native language, or another selected language, and allows you to translate whole texts and the words inside texts.
To use this function you will require internet access, so you will not be able to use this to translate if you are offline.
Download the File
If you would like to follow along download the attachment below.
Finding the Translator
To access Translate go to the Review tab and select Translate in the Language section of the ribbon.
This will open a translator window on the right-hand side of your spreadsheet.
If you have not selected a cell with any text in it when you open the Translator then you will have a message stating that you need to select a text, and a blank box showing what should be translated into.
Translating a Foreign Language
I have entered the phrase “This is an example of how to translate foreign languages” into Excel in English, French, Spanish and Japanese to show how the Translate function treats foreign languages.
When I select the French phrase (cell C4 in the example below) the window on the right auto-detects the language as French in the first box, and then translates this to English in the second box.
The translate function will work with languages that are written with characters from different alphabets too.
The default setting of the spreadsheet I am using is English, which uses the Latin alphabet, but when I select the Japanese phrase (cell C6 in the example below) which has characters from the Japanese alphabet, Excel’s translator can still correctly translate this back into English using the Latin alphabet.
Manually Changing the Language
If you find that Excel has detected the From language incorrectly then you can always manually adjust this by clicking the down arrow next to the From language and select the correct language.
Just like the From language you can also manually change the To language by selecting the downward arrow next to the To language and manually choose whichever language you want the original text to be translated into. This can be useful if you want to translate text from your native language into another language.
If I want to add German into the example I have been using so far then I can use Excel’s translate function to find the correct translation of this and copy and paste it back into my spreadsheet.
You can either type directly into the From box, or highlight a cell with text in it to get the text you want to translate in your native language, and then manually select the language you want to translate it into in the To box.
Then highlight the translated text, right click and select copy, and then paste it into the relevant cell.
If you want to keep the translated text in the same format as you previous text then it would be best to paste it into Excel using the 'Match destination formatting' option. This can be done by right clicking the cell you want to add the translation to and then selecting this from the 'Paste Options'.
Translating Words Within a Text
If you need to see which words from each translation are related to each other you can see this by hovering your mouse cursor over individual words in either the From or To box. Excel will automatically give you a translation of the selected word along with dictionary definitions.
In the example below I have hovered my mouse over the English word “example” and can see that in German this translates to “beispiel”.
Selecting Multiple Cells
If you have lots of cells with text in different languages, like in the example used so far, rather than translating them one by one you can select multiple cells at the same time.
You can do this by highlighting all cells you want translated. Excel will stack these up one by one in the From box, and then stack up the translations in the To box.
When you do select multiple cells with multiple languages the From box will always show just the first language detected, but it will still recognize each individual language.
If using multiple cells though make sure they border each other, if you select cells that are not directly on top or next to each other then only the first language will show. You can see this below where I have selected Spanish in C5 and German in C7, but as there is another cell between them the translator is only picking up Spanish.
Closing the Translator window
To close the translator window click on the X in the top right hand corner.
Conclusion
To translate text entered into Excel in a foreign language you can use the Translate option in the Review tab.
This allows you to translate whole texts within a cell, as well as individual words within a text.
As well as translating text into your own language, you can use the Translate feature to change text into another language by manually selecting the language you want to see.
This can be a useful tool if you receive a document with text in a language you do not know, or if you need to change your own text into another language.
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