Google Translate on Android now offers real-time automated audio translation for 14 languages, according to a Google blog post earlier today. The new languages include Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Polish, Russian and Turkish. The new version is in alpha, so expect some bugs. The first version of Google Translate for Android with Conversation Mode launched back in January 2011, and offered only English to Spanish translations.
Is it Possible to Create Pitch-Perfect Translations?
Language is constantly evolving. Its vast quirks and colloquialisms are never-ending. Just think about sites like UrbanDictionary.com, which have been created specifically for slang terms, and can be updated by anybody. If you want to keep up with language – ever your native tongue – you have to put in some extra work.
And what about the poetics and nuances of language? In ReadWriteWeb Writer Marshall Kirkpatrick’s post on the first launch of Google Conversation Translation for Android, he said:
“Google’s much celebrated computational learning of what words often appear together, thanks to things like search queries and Google Docs, still struggles to come close to the awesome power of wet-ware, the human mind. Language translation is an art. Approaching it like science sounds like a recipe for poor communication.”
The text version of Google Translate for Android is available in 63 languages.
Would you rather text or speak the language you want to translate? Tell us in the comments below.
