Google Translate Blog: May 2013

Google Translate Blog

The official source for news on Google's translation technologies

Take your Phrasebook on the go—and translate by camera in 16 more languages

Wednesday, May 8, 2013

When you’re traveling in another country, you want quick access to your favorite translated phrases—whether it’s “Where can I find a museum?” or “Do you know where the bathroom is?” Google Translate lets you save these translations in your Phrasebook, but you still could not easily access them on the go from your phone or tablet. Starting today, you can automatically sync the phrases in your Phrasebook to your Android device using the Google Translate mobile app, so you can carry your most useful phrases with you wherever you go.
To get started, select Phrasebook in the app menu of the Google Translate app for Android. (Notice that Phrasebook replaces the Favorites feature; your saved phrases are now part of your Phrasebook.) To sync your phrases, simply sign in to your Google Account by tapping the ‘Sign in’ button at the top of your Phrasebook.

With your favorite phrases synced across devices, we hope you’ll never be at a loss for words again.
Last but not least, this latest release of Google Translate for Android sees a significant improvement to the camera-input feature. You can now use camera-input to find translations in 16 additional languages: Bulgarian, Catalan, Danish, Estonian, Finnish, Croatian, Hungarian, Indonesian, Icelandic, Lithuanian, Latvian, Norwegian, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, and Swedish.
Happy translating!
Minqi Jiang, Associate Product Manager, on behalf of the Google Translate Team

Google

Labels: Translate Blog

More than 70 of the world’s languages in the blink of an eye

Wednesday, May 8, 2013

If you took a quick snapshot of content available on the web, you might think that everyone around the world spoke English, Chinese, French or Spanish. But in fact, millions of people around the world speak an incredible array of languages that currently have a small presence across the web.

Google Translate helps bridge the divide between the content available online and people’s ability to access that information. Starting today, you can translate another five languages using Google, which combined are spoken by more than 183 million people around the globe:

Bosnian is an official language in Bosnia and Herzegovina that’s also spoken in regions of neighboring countries and by diaspora communities around the world.

Cebuano is one of the languages spoken in the Philippines, predominantly in the middle (Visayas) and southern (Mindanao) regions of the nation.

You can hear the Hmong language spoken in many countries across the world, including China, Vietnam, Laos, Thailand and throughout the United States.

Javanese is the second most-spoken language in Indonesia (behind Indonesian), with 83 million native speakers.

Marathi is spoken in India and has 73 million native speakers. Google Translate already supports several other Indian languages: Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu.

With the exception of Bosnian, these new languages are “alpha,” meaning while the quality isn’t perfect, we will continue to test and improve them over time. You can access Translate on the web at https://translate.google.com, on your Android or iOS device, or via Chrome and in Gmail. We are excited to reach the 70+ language milestone, and we look forward to continuing to add more languages.