Start the conversation with Google Translate for Android

Thursday, October 13, 2011 | 1:07 AM


Mobile technology and the web have made it easier for people around the world to access information and communicate with each other. But there’s still a daunting obstacle: the language barrier. We’re trying to knock down that barrier so everyone can communicate and connect more easily.

Earlier this year, we launched an update to Google Translate for Android with an experimental feature called Conversation Mode, which enables you to you translate speech back and forth between languages. We began with just English and Spanish, but today we’re expanding to 14 languages, adding Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Polish, Russian and Turkish.




To use Conversation Mode, speak into your phone’s microphone, and the Translate app will translate what you’ve said and read the translation out loud. The person you’re speaking with can then reply in their language, and Conversation Mode will translate what they said and read it back to you.

This technology is still in alpha, so factors like background noise and regional accents may affect accuracy. But since it depends on examples to learn, the quality will improve as people use it more. We wanted to get this early version out to help start the conversation no matter where you are in the world.

We’ve also added some other features to make it easier to speak and read as you translate. For example, if you wanted to say “Where is the train?” but Google Translate recognizes your speech as “Where is the rain?”, you can now correct the text before you translate it. You can also add unrecognized words to your personal dictionary.

When viewing written translation results, you can tap the magnifying glass icon to view the translated text in full screen mode so you can easily show it to someone nearby, or just pinch to zoom in for a close-up view.



Tap the magnifying glass icon to view translations full screen.


Finally, we’ve also optimized the app for larger screens like your Android tablet.

While we work to expand full Conversation Mode to even more languages, Google Translate for Android still supports text translation among 63 languages, voice input in 17 of those languages, and text-to-speech in 24 of them.

Download the Google Translate app in Android Market — it’s available for tablets and mobile phones running Android 2.2 and up.


15 comments:

Kataku said...

Very good it works well.

When will be a offline version???
if i go to travel to another country i will not have internet access, so how can i use Google Translate without Internet??

Miguel Silva said...

That's a minor problem, Internet can reach the whole planet, now how can we translate aliens when we'll enter another galaxy? even with a directional antenna directed to earth light will take too long to wait for translation :P
Next week I'm planning to visit Galaxy Nexus and I'm afraid they won't understand European Portuguese language ;)

JP said...

I can't update from 2.1 to 2.2 on my Nexus S, 'incompatible'. What gives?

Screenshot:
http://i.imgur.com/5txHX.jpg

Christopher said...

Great that you're adding more languages, but I'm sad you're neglecting Swedish as usual!

e30ernest said...

This is a welcome update. However, I see that this app would be really useful while visiting a foreign country. An offline version would really be nice in order to prevent huge mobile bills from data roaming.

- Ernest
Mobile applications developer

Jamie said...

Sorry but, what's the point in this when you can't use it abroad because of the extortion that is roaming data charges.

There's no point to this whole app without an offline version, concentrate on that so that people can actually use it before adding new features that people won't use becuase they don't want to pay £5 for every single sentence that they translate.

BISHNU said...

Happy to know that you are supporting many language but when we try open brower with Nepali hindi language we can't see anything in our mobile. Why you can't put font to web so we can access the southasian website. We love the andriod phone but we can't use as per our wish. I dun think this is big problem for you boz If i browse all those website from ipod i can easily read. Why dun you do something that all southasian pple will think more abt andriod product....hope you will consider something for it.and all the best.....Thx.

John said...

This is very useful application, it helped me a lot to communicate with my Chinese friends and really helped me in enhancing my business.
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Dr. Salman said...

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Viral said...

woww excellent,,

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Americamobi said...

Nice work.. this application works very well. This help me a lot to talk to my friends in China n India..

But till when can we get a offline version of this application???
I don't have Internet connection everytime.

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psv said...

good work ... http://apps-4phone.blogspot.com/

Peter Olva said...

This comment has been removed by the author.