How to Create a Google Sheet that Translate Languages
I do a lot of QA work for emails in different languages and for a long time I would copy the text, go to the Google Translate website and paste it one by one to get my translations. This was a very tedious process and luckily I found there is a better way; the Google translate formula in Google Sheets.
Google Translate Formula
The formula is simple:
=GOOGLETRANSLATE(C2,"en","es")
Find an empty cell and type =GOOGLETRANSLATE. Google Sheets will populate the rest of the formula. Start by adding the cell that contains the copy you want to translate (cell C2 above) followed by a comma, then the 2 letter language code of the language the copy is currently in inside double quotation marks, followed by comma and the two letter language code of the language you want to translate to inside double quotation marks. You can use the table below to find the two letter language code for each language.
In the example above, I am translating the copy from cell C2 from English to Spanish. If I wanted to translate copy from Spanish to English I would simply change the formula to: =GOOGLETRANSLATE(C2,”es”,”en”)
Detect Language Formula
There is another formula you can use if you don’t know what language is currently being used:
=DETECTLANGUAGE(A2)
This is straightforward. Just type =DETECTLANGUAGE and the cell with the copy you want to identify in parentheses and it will return the 2 letter code from the table below.
Watch the full video below and you can access the exercise file I use in the video and make a copy to your drive to try it for yourself.
2 Letter Language Codes for Google Sheets
| 2 Letter Language Code | Language |
|---|---|
| AF | Afrikaans |
| SQ | Albanian |
| AM | Amharic |
| AR | Arabic |
| HY | Armenian |
| AZ | Azerbaijani |
| EU | Basque |
| BN | Bengali, Bangla |
| BG | Bulgarian |
| MY | Burmese |
| BE | Byelorussian |
| KM | Cambodian |
| CA | Catalan |
| ZH | Chinese |
| CO | Corsican |
| HR | Croatian |
| CS | Czech |
| DA | Danish |
| NL | Dutch |
| EN | English, American |
| EO | Esperanto |
| ET | Estonian |
| FI | Finnish |
| FR | French |
| FY | Frisian |
| GD | Gaelic (Scots Gaelic) |
| GL | Galician |
| KA | Georgian |
| DE | German |
| EL | Greek |
| GU | Gujarati |
| HA | Hausa |
| IW | Hebrew |
| HI | Hindi |
| HU | Hungarian |
| IS | Icelandic |
| IN | Indonesian |
| GA | Irish |
| IT | Italian |
| JA | Japanese |
| JW | Javanese |
| KN | Kannada |
| KK | Kazakh |
| KY | Kirghiz |
| KO | Korean |
| KU | Kurdish |
| LO | Laothian |
| LA | Latin |
| LV | Latvian, Lettish |
| LT | Lithuanian |
| MK | Macedonian |
| MG | Malagasy |
| MS | Malay |
| ML | Malayalam |
| MT | Maltese |
| MI | Maori |
| MR | Marathi |
| MO | Moldavian |
| MN | Mongolian |
| NE | Nepali |
| NO | Norwegian |
| PS | Pashto, Pushto |
| FA | Persian |
| PL | Polish |
| PT | Portuguese |
| PA | Punjabi |
| RO | Romanian |
| RU | Russian |
| SM | Samoan |
| SR | Serbian |
| ST | Sesotho |
| SN | Shona |
| SD | Sindhi |
| SI | Singhalese |
| SK | Slovak |
| SL | Slovenian |
| SO | Somali |
| ES | Spanish |
| SU | Sudanese |
| SW | Swahili |
| SV | Swedish |
| TL | Tagalog |
| TG | Tajik |
| TA | Tamil |
| TE | Tegulu |
| TH | Thai |
| TR | Turkish |
| UK | Ukrainian |
| UR | Urdu |
| UZ | Uzbek |
| VI | Vietnamese |
| CY | Welsh |
| XH | Xhosa |
| JI | Yiddish |
| YO | Yoruba |
| ZU | Zulu |
