We are so excited to share Excel’s newest translation capabilities with you! Meet TRANSLATE, which allows us to easily translate text from one language to another using language codes within a function. This is so much faster than the old method! Previously, we’d have to select our cell, navigate to the review tab, select the translate tool, choose our desired language, and then copy the translated text into our workbook…for every. single. value. Who has time for that?!
The new TRANSLATE function allows us to change the language of multiple cells at once 😌. In order to do so, we’ll need to define the following three arguments of this function:
- Text: the text you want to translate
- Source_Language: the language code of the text’s current language
- Target_Language: the language code of the language we’d like to translate to
Check out the gif above to see TRANSLATE help us change some text from English to Spanish for our website. All we have to do is enter the TRANSLATE function, select the original phrase as the text argument, enter “en” as the source_language argument, since our text is currently in English and “en” is the respective language code, and enter “es” as the target_language argument, since we’re hoping to end up with Spanish phrases. Now we just enter the formula and fill it down the column! Hecho!
No need to stress if we don’t know every language code - Microsoft provides a full language code list here! Have fun!
