Just in case you didn't know, and you have plans to actually use Google Translate for translating web pages into Spanish... please don't. I haven't seen a single sentence with more than 3-4 words translated properly from English to Spanish. Even the examples shown in the README make no sense in Spanish.
What's causing this?<p><pre><code> ruby-1.8.7-p302 > "Where is the bathroom?".to_spanish
=> "\302\277D\303\263nde est\303\241 el ba\303\261o?"</code></pre>
Since this gem appears to use Google's public API, one important thing to keep in mind is that there's probably a hard limit on the amount of text that can be translated at one go. I've found that throwing more than a thousand or so characters at GT's API results in their server throwing "URI too long" errors, since it only works via HTTP GET.<p>Disclaimer: This might have changed in the five or six months since I last messed around with Google's API, or, alternatively, this gem could be doing something clever to try and get around the problem. Either way, I'd suggest checking it out.
This is cool, but no one should ever use this. I've used the google translator frequently, and while it's good, it always requires me to use my knowledge of the language I'm translating to in order to create a more correct and meaningful translation. If you really want a site or app that is multilingual, you need a human with good knowledge of the language to do your translations.