Break the Language Barrier in Excel: Translate Any Text Instantly!

Kyle Pew
3 hours ago
2 min read

If you’ve ever worked with international teams or global datasets in Excel, you’ve probably come across reviews, comments, or content written in multiple languages. Wouldn’t it be amazing if Excel could instantly tell you the language and translate it?

Great news: It can!

With Excel’s powerful TRANSLATE and DETECTLANGUAGE functions, you can now automatically identify the language of any text and translate it into your preferred language — all without leaving Excel.

What Are These Functions?

Let’s break them down:

DETECTLANGUAGE(text)

This function detects the language of a given text string.

Syntax:

=DETECTLANGUAGE(A2)

Example:

If cell A2 contains "Este curso fue increíble", the formula will return "es" for Spanish.

It’s great for:

Identifying the source language before translation
Filtering or categorizing multilingual data

TRANSLATE(text, [from_language], to_language)

This function translates text from one language to another.

Syntax:

=TRANSLATE(A2, "es", "en")

text – the content you want to translate
from_language – the language code of the original text (optional if used with DETECTLANGUAGE)
to_language – the target language code (e.g., "en" for English)

Example with auto-detect:

=TRANSLATE(A2, DETECTLANGUAGE(A2), "en")

This combines both functions to detect the original language and translate it into English.

Real-Life Example:

Course Reviews from Around the World

In my latest YouTube video, I use a dataset of course reviews submitted by students in multiple languages, including:

Spanish 🇪🇸
French 🇫🇷
Japanese 🇯🇵
Arabic 🇸🇦
German 🇩🇪
Chinese 🇨🇳
Russian 🇷🇺
And more...

You’ll see how to:

Detect the language for each review
Automatically translate it into English
Create a fully bilingual review sheet for analysis

🎯 Why This Is a Game-Changer

This functionality is a huge win for:

✅ Global teams collaborating in Excel

✅ Customer support analyzing feedback across regions

✅ Instructors, marketers, or data analysts handling multilingual surveys

✅ Anyone working with diverse or international datasets

EXERCISE FILE DOWNLOAD