translate

The newest update to Google Translate for Android adds Google Goggles' optical character recognition (OCR) technology, so you can translate text using only your device's camera lens. Whereas previously you had to type, hand-write (onscreen), or say your text aloud in order to use the app, this new feature requires none of the above.

To use the new OCR feature, just push the camera button at the bottom of the main translate screen. This activates your camera and opens a viewfinder just below the translation field. After you take your picture, brush the text you want to translate, and … Read more

Google Translate for Android is a simple, versatile tool that supports more than 60 languages, offers an SMS translator, and even speaks some of your translations aloud.

The best thing about Google Translate is its simplicity. The app is decked out with a sleek, ICS-flavored Holo theme, complete with Android 4.0's signature action bar and drop-down menu. Altogether, the new skin is a marked improvement over the slightly clunkier interface developed for Android Gingerbread.

To use Google Translate, just select your input and output languages, then type in your text. For even faster results, you can set the … Read more

As anyone who has used Google's translation service knows, the offering can be quite useful, but somewhat spotty in its accuracy. Google is now trying to change that with a new, experimental feature.

Web site owners looking to have their pages translated must first add Google's Website Translator plugin to their site. Next up, they'll need to add the company's new customization meta tag to the site. After the site's text has been translated, that meta tag will display a new field, called "Contribute a better translation." Clicking that opens a text box … Read more

Translating the Internet into every language is a massive undertaking, and one that machine translation isn't up to handling. Luis von Ahn is tackling the problem with Duolingo, a free language-learning service that doubles as a crowdsourced text translation platform.

Users follow a step-by-step instruction process to learn a language, and at the same time they are translating Web sites and other kinds of information available on the Internet.

The service has been in private beta, starting with lessons for English speakers to learn Spanish and German, and Spanish users to learn English. Von Ahn, the A. Nico Habermann … Read more

iTranslate Voice lets you speak to translate in 31 different languages offering excellent speech recognition so you don't even need to use the keyboard. Great for learning new languages or acting as your personal translator when traveling, this app has a great layout for quick translations on the fly.

iTranslate offers a clean intuitive interface that only requires a couple of steps to translate in the languages you want. Simply touch the gear icon (settings) in the upper-left corner, then choose your spoken language and the language you want to translate to. You also have options for having the … Read more

SayHi Translate is a surprisingly accurate voice translation app that could be the tool world travelers have been looking for quick translations. Using the app is easy. Simply touch the wrench icon to choose your language, then the language you want something translated to, then return to the main interface. From there you can either touch your language button to speak or touch the smaller keyboard icon to type a sentence and SayHi Translate will translate the sentence and speak it back to you (or whomever your trying to communicate with). It doesn't get everything right, but if you … Read more

Ever wanted to know how to turn a phrase in Esperanto, Bengali, Chinese, or some other language? Seems lots of people do, in fact millions.

Google announced today that more than 200 million people actively use Google Translate monthly. Add up all those words and that equals roughly the same amount of text per day as there is written in 1 million books.

"To put it another way: what all the professional human translators in the world produce in a year, our system translates in roughly a single day," Google Translate research scientist Franz Och wrote in a … Read more

Foreign-language phrase books or dictionaries often only get you so far if you're a beginner trying to hold a conversation in your non-native language.

But a mobile app called Vocre aims to make such a conversation "as simple as record, review, and translate," according to Andrew Lauder, founder of MyLanguage, which created the app.

To get a conversation going, the app uses some of the same technology that powers Siri, Apple's voice assistant, as well as audio technology from a company called iSpeech. MyLanguage is also using a crowdsourcing model so that the translation technology gets … Read more

There is no shortage of stories that highlight the utility of Apple's iPhone and this is certainly one of those circumstances. After several reports of an impaired driver heading westbound on I-84 near The Dalles in north-central Oregon, two officers decided to pull the man over, according to KVAL.com.

The man was definitely impaired, but another challenge proved more difficult for the officers--he only spoke Chinese.

In order to get to the bottom of the problem, one of the officers grabbed his iPhone and opened the Google Translate app. The man was able to speak into the phone … Read more