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.

Some of you may already be using the new optical character recognition (OCR) and translation of Russian in Google Goggles that we previewed at last week’s Inside Search event. Starting today, we’re pleased to introduce some additional new features, including a map view of your Search History and the ability to copy contact and text results to the clipboard. We’ve also changed the results interface to make it easier to view and navigate through your results.

Russian optical character recognition (OCR) and translation
Since Google Goggles first launched in 2009, it has been able to recognize and translate text in a number of different languages, as long as the language used Latin characters. With the launch of OCR for Russian, Goggles is now able to read Cyrillic characters. Goggles will recognize a picture of Russian text and allow you to translate the text into one of over 40 other languages. Russian OCR is also available for users of Google Goggles on the Google Search app for iOS. Очень полезно!

Map view of your search history
If you’ve enabled search history on Goggles, your history contains a list of all the images that you’ve searched for, as well as some information about where you performed the search if you chose to share your location with Google. Sometimes this can be a pretty long list, so we wanted to give you another way to sort and visualize your Goggles results.

We’ve added a map view, which shows your Goggles image search history on a map so you can quickly zoom and pan to find a query from a particular location.



Copy contact and text results to clipboard
Finally, imagine that you wanted to grab a URL or telephone number from a sign and email it to yourself. Now, Goggles gives you the option of copying the recognized text to your phone’s clipboard, allowing you to paste the test into a number of applications.

To try these new features download Google Goggles 1.5 from Android Market, or scan the QR code below with your phone.

(Cross-posted on the Google Translate blog)

Today we launched an update to Google Translate for Android that allows you to listen to translations in several more languages.

We’ve dramatically improved the quality of our spoken translations in over 15 languages, including Russian, Chinese and Portuguese, and added the ability to listen to three new languages: Japanese, Arabic and Korean. Text-to-speech is one of the most popular features of this mobile interface. Whether you’re learning how to say a foreign phrase, or trying to share information with someone in their language, simply tap the Speaker icon after doing a translation and you’ll hear the difference.





With today’s launch, Google Translate for Android supports translation between 58 languages and can speak translations in 24 languages. The application works on phones and tablets running Android 2.1 and above. To download Google Translate for Android, scan the QR code below, or visit us on the Android Market.

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog and Google Translate Blog.)

Back in August 2008, we launched a Google Translate HTML5 web app for iPhone users. Today, the official Google Translate for iPhone app is available for download from the App Store. The new app has all of the features of the web app, plus some significant new additions designed to improve your overall translation experience.

Speak to translate
The new app accepts voice input for 15 languages, and—just like the web app—you can translate a word or phrase into one of more than 50 languages. For voice input, just press the microphone icon next to the text box and say what you want to translate.

Listen to your translations
You can also listen to your translations spoken out loud in one of 23 different languages. This feature uses the same new speech synthesizer voices as the desktop version of Google Translate we introduced last month.


Full-screen mode
Another feature that might come in handy is the ability to easily enlarge the translated text to full-screen size. This way, it’s much easier to read the text on the screen, or show the translation to the person you are communicating with. Just tap on the zoom icon to quickly zoom in.


And the app also includes all of the major features of the web app, including the ability to view dictionary results for single words, access your starred translations and translation history even when offline, and support romanized text like Pinyin and Romaji.

You can download Google Translate now from the App Store globally. The app is available in all iOS supported languages, but you’ll need an iPhone or iPod touch iOS version 3 or later.

Posted by Wenzhang Zhu, Software Engineer

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog and Translate Blog.)

When we launched the first version of Google Translate for Android in January 2010, we were excited about the year ahead. For the first time, we were bringing the capabilities supported on Google Translate—like machine translation, romanization of non-Roman scripts and spoken translations—to the Android platform. We also offered voice input to let you speak the word or phrase you wanted to translate instead of typing it in, and SMS translation so you could translate SMS messages sent to you in foreign languages.

Today, we’re refreshing Translate for Android with several updates to make the app easier to interact with. Among other improvements, we’ve created better dropdown boxes to help select the languages you want to translate from and into, an improved input box, and cleaner icons and layout.

We also want to let you in on an experimental feature that’s still in its earliest stages—Conversation Mode. This is a new interface within Google Translate that’s optimized to allow you to communicate fluidly with a nearby person in another language. You may have seen an early demo a few months ago, and today you can try it yourself on your Android device.

Currently, you can only use Conversation Mode when translating between English and Spanish. In conversation mode, simply press the microphone for your language and start speaking. Google Translate will translate your speech and read the translation out loud. Your conversation partner can then respond in their language, and you’ll hear the translation spoken back to you. Because this technology is still in alpha, factors like regional accents, background noise or rapid speech may make it difficult to understand what you’re saying. Even with these caveats, we’re excited about the future promise of this technology to be able to help people connect across languages.

As Android devices have spread across the globe, we’ve seen Translate for Android used all over. The majority of our usage now comes from outside the United States, and we’ve seen daily usage from more than 150 countries, from Malaysia to Mexico to Mozambique. It’s really rewarding for us to see how this new platform is helping us break down language barriers the world over.

Translate supports 53 languages, from Afrikaans to Yiddish, and voice input for 15 languages. You can download the application, available for devices running Android 2.1 and above, by searching for “Google Translate” in Android Market or by scanning the QR Code below.


Posted by Awaneesh Verma, Product Manager

Traveling to another country can be an amazing experience. The opportunity to immerse yourself in a different culture can give you a new perspective. However, it can be hard to fully enjoy the experience if you do not understand the local language. For example, ordering food from a menu you can not read can be an adventure. Today we are introducing a new feature of Google Goggles that will prove useful to travelers and monoglots everywhere: Goggles translation.

For millennia man and animal have tolerantly coexisted, separated by language and the development of opposable thumbs. Today we can proudly say that we have overcome one of those hurdles. Presenting Google Translate for Animals, a new application available in Android Market.



This application allows you to record animal sounds and have the sounds analyzed and translated by Google Translate into any of the 52 supported languages. With animal translation you can finally understand why Spot keeps peeing in your closet or why Pickles keeps leaving dead mice in the tub. No longer must humanity struggle to comprehend when Lassie warns, “Hurry, Timmy’s fallen down the well!”

The technology isn’t perfect yet, so you may discover some translations that don’t make perfect sense. The algorithms are always improving however, thanks to the large corpus of cute cat videos that have been uploaded to YouTube.

We think that this is an exciting step in understanding and communicating with the world around us. Stay tuned for the addition of “old car” and “stomach” to the translation capabilities of the application this summer.

Posted by Woof Woofington, Product Barketing Manager via Google Translate for Animals

A few months ago I was planning a vacation to Austria and Italy. I knew a few words and phrases in German and Italian, but that was about it. So I looked around for some portable language dictionaries. I thought Google Translate was great, but the web page didn't work that well on the iPhone. So I teamed up with David Singleton, a fellow engineer in our London office, to build an iPhone interface for Google Translate.

Google Translate for iPhone is optimized for speed, supports all of the existing Google Translate language pairs, and uses a client-side data-store on your iPhone to hang on to your past translations so you always have them at hand, even if you can't use the local data network. We wrote this using the AJAX Language API, so every time the Google Translate team updates the languages they support, the languages will automatically be added here.

I tried an early version of this interface out on my trip and it was great -- although my pronunciation wasn't. So every now and then, I would just hold up my phone to let people read what I couldn't. If you're wondering about data costs, I found that I could get between 200 and 400 translations in 1MB of data download. Although we don't charge for this service, your carrier may charge for the data usage so be sure to know what your roaming rates are. For my plan, I found that I could translate 400 phrases for less than $10 when roaming internationally.

To try Google Translate for iPhone, point your iPhone or iPod Touch web browser to www.google.com and choose the "more" tab. Or you can go directly to translate.google.com in your browser. If you are traveling this summer (perhaps on your way to Beijing?) we hope you find this useful.

Posted by Allen Hutchison, software engineer