Google Translate comes to the iPhone

Google has released a version of its translation service that is specifically tailored to Apple's iPhone.

The Google Translate mobile service, launched late Thursday, came about as the result of the company's "20 percent" time policy, which sets aside a day of each employee's week for work on any new project or idea they may wish to pursue. Google has not yet made any announcements about future versions of the service that could work on other handsets, but a company representative told ZDNet UK on Friday that such versions were intended.

Because the service works using the Apple handset's Safari browser, a data connection is needed most of the time--previously searched phrases and words are, however, stored on the phone itself for future access. The service can translate text between 24 languages, including Mandarin, French, and Japanese.

"Our basic mobile strategy is making sure all of our products work on mobile devices, so it's a step in that direction," said Google's representative. "(The service) builds on the Google Languages (application programming interface), which we made public around a year ago, so the only bit we built specially was the iPhone interface. It's a tool anyone could build, but we built it to integrate with the other Google products for the iPhone."

The service was developed by a software engineer from Google UK's advertising business, Allen Hutchison. According to the representative, Hutchison built it "in a matter of weeks." Other Google products that have come out of the "20 percent time" policy have included Gmail and Google News.

Asked whether the translation service's release was timed to coincide with the opening of the Beijing Olympics, the representative said the timing was "serendipitous," adding: "We launch things when they're ready."

Another mobile translation service, from the VoIP company Jajah, was unveiled this week specifically to coincide with the start of the Olympic Games, but the audio-based service suffered an outage soon after being launched.

David Meyer of ZDNet UK reported from London.

Click here for more stories on tech and the Beijing Olympics.

[coryschulz]

About time. They should've created a web app for this months ago... It probably would've taken someone at Google a few days to create and perfect a web app. Something like this is so useful for traveling. I wish they had a text to speech app for Google translate.

[Merlosso]

Thanks for the article, this is good news and I would like to check it out. A direct link would be nice. I mean, this is an article about a web app and I'm reading it from my iPhone but there is no link to it. Oh well, I guess I'll go Google "Google Translate" now so I can experience what this article is about.

[FS1982!]

How cool is this! Google that is awesome!

[Seaspray0]

David Meyer, does this app work on other smartphones or just the iphone? Why did you leave this tidbit out of your report?