For those looking to follow the Iranian protest more closely Google has quickly added Persian (Farsi) to its list of languages for its Google Translate service. It's a bit of a rushed feature, only allow for translations into and from English, but the company says they felt it was important to get it added now and plans to work on offering translations from Persian into other languages as well.

Franz Och, Principal Scientist for Google says:

 " We feel that launching Persian is particularly important now, given ongoing events in Iran. Like YouTube and other services, Google Translate is one more tool that Persian speakers can use to communicate directly to the world, and vice versa — increasing everyone's access to information.

As with all machine translation, it's not perfect yet. And we're launching this service quickly, so it may perform slowly at times. We'll keep a close watch and if it breaks, we'll restore service as quickly as we can.

We've optimized this service for translation between Persian and English. But we're working hard to improve Persian translation for the additional 40 languages available via Google Translate. If you see something you think is incorrectly translated, we invite you to click on the "contribute a better translation" link and we'll learn from your correction."