I’m not great with Yahoo pipes. The fact that I appreciate their power and have been able to harness it just a wee bit has been due to the work of über piper Tony Hirst.

Browsing his work I came across a tweet auto-translation pipe which Tony explains in detail here. Using it to search #cuba on Twitter gives an interesting service for those who don’t speak Spanish. Although machine translation has its limitations, for micro-blogging it might just give enough gist to make the tweet useful.

Here’s what the pipe looks like when it’s run.

I’ve defaulted it to #cuba and an English translation but you can input whatever you want and using standard translation language codes translate into different languages.

The pipe also allows various output options (rss, json, php) as well as useful embed codes. Here’s what it looks like embedded:

{“pipe_id”:”56222e355075442adcd8bb93385c5594″,”_btype”:”list”,”pipe_params”:{“q”:”#cuba”,”lang”:”en”}}

Although Hemos Oido does a great job in cooperatively translating cuban blogs I can’t see cooperative translation of tweets able to keep up. So, maybe the pipe has a place. Anyway, you can see it, use it, play with it, and clone it here.