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How to Use Google Translate in Google Sheets

If you need to translate text from one language into another, there is a handy built-in function in Google Sheets called GOOGLETRANSLATE that will do this.

In this tutorial, I will show you how to use the GOOGLETRANSLATE function in Google Sheets.

Table of Contents

GOOGLETRANSLATE Syntax

The GOOGLETRANSLATE function will convert text from one language into another.

The syntax of the function is:

=GOOGLETRANSLATE(text, [source_language, target_language])

  • text – this is the text that will be translated from the source language to the new language. It must be text inside quotation marks or a cell reference to a cell containing the text
  • source_language – this is the two-letter language code of the source language. This argument is optional and will be set to “auto” by default.
  • target_language –  this is the two-letter language code of what you want the source language translated into. This argument is optional and will be set to the system language by default.

Using the GOOGLETRANSLATE Function

To understand how to use the GOOGLETRANSLATE formula in your spreadsheet, let’s take a look at an example:

GOOGLETRANSLATE example

In the example above I have three formulas.

This first formula converts English to Spanish, the second converts English to Vietnamese, and the third formula converts English to French.

You can see in the example above that using the Google Translate formula is very easy, you just need the text you are translating, and the language codes of the source and target language.

The language codes need to be inside quotation marks like in the example above.

Here is a table of some of the language codes that are supported with this function:

Language Name Native Language Name Code
Afrikaans Afrikaans af
Albanian Shqip sq
Arabic عربي ar
Armenian Հայերէն hy
Azerbaijani آذربایجان دیلی az
Basque Euskara eu
Belarusian Беларуская be
Bulgarian Български bg
Catalan Català ca
Chinese (Simplified) 中文简体 zh-CN
Chinese (Traditional) 中文繁體 zh-TW
Croatian Hrvatski hr
Czech Čeština cs
Danish Dansk da
Dutch Nederlands nl
English English en
Estonian Eesti keel et
Filipino Filipino tl
Finnish Suomi fi
French Français fr
Galician Galego gl
Georgian ქართული ka
German Deutsch de
Greek Ελληνικά el
Haitian Creole Kreyòl ayisyen ht
Hebrew עברית iw
Hindi हिन्दी hi
Hungarian Magyar hu
Icelandic Íslenska is
Indonesian Bahasa Indonesia id
Irish Gaeilge ga
Italian Italiano it
Japanese 日本語 ja
Korean 한국어 ko
Latvian Latviešu lv
Lithuanian Lietuvių kalba lt
Macedonian Македонски mk
Malay Malay ms
Maltese Malti mt
Norwegian Norsk no
Persian فارسی fa
Polish Polski pl
Portuguese Português pt
Romanian Română ro
Russian Русский ru
Serbian Српски sr
Slovak Slovenčina sk
Slovenian Slovensko sl
Spanish Español es
Swahili Kiswahili sw
Swedish Svenska sv
Thai ไทย th
Turkish Türkçe tr
Ukrainian Українська uk
Urdu اردو ur
Vietnamese Tiếng Việt vi
Welsh Cymraeg cy
Yiddish ייִדיש yi

Closing Thoughts

The GOOGLETRANSLATE function is a useful formula for translating text from one language into another. Not every language is supported with this function but they do support many common languages.

One important thing to note is that the translation is not always perfect, so just keep that in mind when you are using this function.

More Google Sheets Tutorials:
How to Refresh Formulas