Google Translate now fits in your pocket

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Google has updated yet another one of its products to work better on Apple's iPhone. On Thursday the company launched a new version of its Translate service that lets anyone convert their native tongue into one of the other 23 available languages.

The service has been reworked mainly to appeal to travelers who don't want to carry around phrase books and have their mobile phones with them anyway. In a post about the update, Google software engineer Allen Hutchison notes that the tool uses as minimal an amount of data as possible, so it won't break the bank while you're abroad and incur massive data roaming charges from your carrier. Hutchison says the general number of translations is anywhere between 200-400 per 1MB of data, which is quite a few considering data can cost you at least $0.005 per KB while abroad (depending your carrier).

The tool also keeps track of all your previous entries, so each time you come back to the page, your past translations will be there. You can get it to go back and re-translate them all to another language without getting rid of the old ones.

Also, in case you're trying to use it as a tool to communicate with someone else (without slaughtering any pronunciations) you can reverse the two languages on the fly, letting someone else type using their own language as long as it matches your phone's selected character set.

Still missing from the mobile version of Translate is the site translator and the dictionary utility that pulls up full word definitions and commonly used phrases that surround them, the former being useful for hitting local hotel or attraction sites while out on the go.

[Lerianis]

Does anyone know if there is a service like this that you can download to your notebook computer, without the need for a internet connection?

[CydeSwype]

In case anyone other than me was wondering...that screenshot is not actually english to german...i think it's english to dutch. the "i am a jelly donut" reference was a an attempt of JFK to speak german to the people of berlin...fwiw

[Josh.Lowensohn]

You win comments for today. I'm glad you got it.

[Michichael]

Lerianis - Not for free! The amount of data that goes into this kind of program is massive, and what you see is a simple front end connecting to hundreds if not thousands of servers and resources through complex algorithms .... well you get the point. Short and simple, no, there isn't one like this available. However, there is translation software for specific languages. I could very well be wrong though, and there might be software that supports 23 languages, but I'm not aware of it.