Google Translate currently supports over 100 languages. With the new update, users can translate a total of 88 languages to any of the languages supported by Google Translate, simply by aiming their camera at texts. Earlier, the text translator only supported translation to English.
The new update is very promising. From its previous version with low-quality translations, a limited set of languages, and a jumpy interface, Google has updated it to a faster, more accurate and a more language-friendly version.
What’s the new update in Google Translate’s Camera?
- The newest version of the Google Translate will have several major improvements real-time camera-based translation including the “Instant Camera Translation” feature.
- The updated app will provide high-quality translations for all users including those who don’t have access to the Internet.
- The new modifications will now support more than 60 new languages like Arabic, Latin, Javanese, Greek, Hindi, Malay, Thai, Persian, and Vietnamese.
- Being empowered by Neural Machine Translation (NMT), translation errors would be reduced by 85 percent and the speed of translation would also improve.
One need to just select “Detect language” by pointing the camera at the source language, and the app will instantly detect the language and translate it to any one of the 88 languages chosen by the user. Users can also translate texts in photos which have been taken earlier with the “Import” option. Previously, the translator worked for hand-written texts only and had no real-time camera use.
The Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models have not only been included in Google Lens and the web version of the app but also to support instant camera translations. The offline translations will now be much better than before, due to the NMT technology running in the background even when the phone is offline.
Below, is the list of languages, Google Translate’s Camera will support after the update:
Afrikaans
Albanian
Arabic
Azerbaijani
Basque
Belarusian
Bengali
Bosnian
Bulgarian
Catalan
Cebuano
Chichewa
Chinese
Corsican
Croatian
Czech
Danish
Dutch
English
Esperanto
Estonian
Filipino
Finnish
French
Frisian
Galician
German
Greek
Haitian Creole
Hausa
Hawaiian
Hindi
Hmong
Hungarian
Icelandic
Igbo
Indonesian
Irish
Italian
Japanese
Javanese
Kazakh
Korean
Kurdish
Kyrgyz
Latin
Latvian
Lithuanian
Luxembourgish
Macedonian
Malagasy
Malay
Maltese
Maori
Marathi
Mongolian
Nepali
Norwegian
Pashto
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Romanian
Russian
Samoan
Scots Gaelic
Serbian
Sesotho
Shona
Sindhi
Slovak
Slovenian
Somali
Spanish
Sundanese
Swahili
Swedish
Tajik
Thai
Turkish
Ukrainian
Urdu
Uzbek
Vietnamese
Welsh
Xhosa
Yoruba
Zulu
Each of the language set for Google Translate lies in- between 35MB and 45MB; therefore they are not much of a burden to download, offline.
The updated app is available for both the platforms, Android and iOS. The company said in a blog post that the update would be available from the 10th of July, Wednesday.
Vacations will become easy with the update. Translating a signboard instantly will no longer be a hassle. It will be done instantly and in the language preferred by the user, which need not be English only.
- Highlights of the update:
- Automatically detect the languages
- Better translations empowered by the Neural Machine Translation
- A new appearance
The Verge stated that the update will only be made available to around one percent of all users on the 10th of July. It may take at least a few weeks for Google to make the updates available to a larger number of users.
