How to use AI-powered search in Google Bard for translation and interpreting
Ever tried asking ChatGPT about current affairs?
If so, you probably realized that ChatGPT is clueless about recent events.
Good news: Google’s AI-powered search engine isn’t!
In previous articles, I’ve discussed how to use artificial intelligence in Readwise Reader, Sketch Engine, and Notion for preparation.
In this article, we’ll look at Google Bard, an AI-powered tool to quickly get the gist of a topic and pull together a glossary – complete with images!
A brief introduction to Bard
Language professionals are regularly pressed for time – from translations on a tight deadline to last-minute interpretation assignments. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to grasp a concept and its terminology faster?
Enter Google Bard.
Google's large language model was trained on an enormous dataset and resembles ChatGPT, with an easy-to-use AI chatbot that can write general and creative copy, translate texts, and format results into spreadsheets.
While the free version of ChatGPT only accesses information up to June 2021, Bard can tap into up-to-date information and news by searching the net.
Available in 45+ languages, including Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Russian, and Spanish, Bard can also provide results in specific dialects, like American or British English or Mexican or peninsular Spanish.
In addition to accessing recent texts, Bard interfaces with other Google products, so you can easily export to Docs or Sheets.
Let’s dive into some ways I’ve used Bard to prepare for recent assignments.
Get definitions – and much more
Unsure what a word means? Ask Bard, and you’ll get a definition, examples of the word in use, and synonyms.
Bard often adds context by including images or helping you understand related terms, as you can see below.
Research a subject
I did 95% of my preparation for a recent assignment about the Democratic Republic of the Congo using Google Bard.
All I knew was that the meeting would cover politics, migration and mining, with a focus on child labor and human rights abuses.
To gain an overview of the subject, I asked Bard:
Tell me about politics in the DRC. Which leaders and political parties are in charge? What are the major political conflicts in the DRC right now?
Based on the answers, I followed up with a few questions:
List all the ethnic groups in the DRC, and tell me which are in conflict with other groups, and why.
What are the names of the active armed groups in the eastern provinces of the DRC? What are they fighting about?
What is a Mai-Mai militia?
I also asked questions about the specific topics to be addressed in the meeting:
Tell me about displacement in the DRC. Why are people displaced? Where are they from? How many people are displaced? Where are they displaced to?
Tell me more about internally displaced people in the DRC. Where are they living? What are their ethnicities?
What types of materials are mined in the DRC?
Tell me more about child labor in the mines in the DRC.
I phrased my questions just like I would while speaking English, but this will work in any language Bard supports.
As I read through the results, I jotted down some notes to pull together a quick fact sheet. You can do this on paper or digitally – or even better, click the “Share and export” button to export the results to a Google Document, then underline or underline key ideas.
Bard often lists its sources. Just click a link to delve deeper into a topic!
Where relevant, Bard also provides images and charts. For my recent assignment, one response included a graph with a breakdown of the different ethnic groups in the DRC; another displayed a map of where members of a specific ethnic group were living.
Extract terms
After searching the web, you can ask Bard to extract key terms and create glossaries from its answers.
Try prompts like:
Extract a list of 20 key terms from the text above, and present them as a two-column table, with the term and its definition.
Add a new column to the table above with the French translations of these terms.
(You’ll find a more comprehensive discussion of the best prompts for AI-powered term extraction in my Notion AI article.)
Most AI-powered tools can handle this type of extraction, but Bard draws on its search capabilities and Google integrations to offer unique features. Ask it to suggest links for further reading or add images to a table. Then, click the “Share and export” button to export the glossary into Google Sheets, where you can easily share it with a colleague or download it in a widely used format (like .CSV or .XLS) and upload it to your termbase or glossary management tool.
Create glossaries
Starting from a blank slate? No worries. You can also ask Bard to generate a list of terms from a keyword or based on a specific topic.
To generate more pertinent results, make your questions specific, ask for multi-word or technical terms, and indicate the number of entries you’d like in your glossary. Feel free to ask for images or links as well.
If you need more results, ask Bard to add additional rows to your table. You can always export to Google Sheets, edit out the terms you don’t need, and then share the glossary or import it to your termbase.
For my recent assignment, I asked Bard to create a table with the most commonly mined minerals in the DRC, their French translations, an image of each material, the products they are used to create, and a link where I could read more.
Translate an email, text or speech
Although Bard falls short of DeepL – which can translate PDF, Word, PowerPoint and text files – it does a solid job at translating text.
Paste in a jargon-packed text, speech, or email you’d like to fire off, and it’ll give you three different translations in seconds.
Pick your preferred version and click the “Share and export” button to send the text to Google Docs or Gmail. Make a few tweaks, and you’re ready to fire off that email or read out translations of those key quotations when they’re delivered at breakneck speed.
(To learn more about these topics, check out my article about AI and confidentiality and my DeepL dive dive.)
A few words of caution
Since Google uses your conversations to improve Bard and other tools, it should never be used with confidential information.
For highly specialized fields, Bard might not capture all necessary terms or the most relevant translations. Supplement Bard with additional research and preparation, and only use it for the assignments where it’s a good match.
Like other AI tools, Bard occasionally hallucinates. Always cross-reference Bard’s answers with external sources to ensure accuracy, and use your human brain to fact-check the information it gives you and improve the texts it writes.
Bard in a nutshell
Bard is Google’s free, user-friendly, AI-powered search engine. Designed as a chatbot, it understands questions in dozens of languages, which makes it a great tool for researching a topic or creating a fact sheet or glossary.
Unlike many other AI tools, Bard can access the most recent information on the internet, and will provide links to its sources which you can use to delve deeper.
Bard’s answers often include helpful examples, images and graphics. I especially appreciate that it provides three answers to each question, which can be ideal for fleshing out your understanding.
Since Bard lives within the Google ecosystem, it’s easy to export results to Google Docs or Sheets, edit, share, and download them, and upload them to your favorite termbase or glossary management tool.
In conclusion, Google’s Bard is an impressive AI-powered chatbot that can help speed up some of the most tedious preparation tasks translators and interpreters face – especially for last-minute assignments.
Ready to get started? Sign into your Google account (or set one up for free), then dive into Bard.
This article is based on our techforword insiders webinar AI-Powered Search for Translators and Interpreters with Google Bard. For a deep dive and hands-on practice to test out these techniques, check out the replay.
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