New York — Slowly but surely, global search engine giant Google is attempting to capture the tricorder-like world where anything two parties say in a typical conversation can be translated into the other person’s language in real-time. Late last weekend, the company announced that their popular Google Translate for Android application now offers support for 14 languages via their “Conversation Mode”, allowing callers to receive on the fly translations as they talk to people in various parts of the world.
According to a post on the Google Blog, Google has revised its Google Translate for Android application now consists a total of 14 different languages in the app’s experimental “Conversation Mode” feature. Or, in other words, real-time translation: As the below video demonstrates, Conversation Mode allows two parties to speak to each other using the app as a language interpreter.
Google Translate for Android, the mobile application of the popular machine translation software, was previously only available for English and Spanish languages, but now the company has expanded it to translate speech back and forth between the following 14 languages: Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Polish, Russian and Turkish.
While empowering the world with numerous applications and service, Google introduced Translate for Android last year to help Android phone owners translate content into different languages via text and for spoken translation on Android handsets. The application offers text translation among 63 languages, voice input in 17 of those languages, and text-to-speech in 24 of them.
Also, the company earlier this year included Conversation Mode, which lets users to translate chats between English and Spanish. However, do not expect the app’s conversation feature to work flawlessly in all situations.
Well, with the recently released enhancement, you speak into the microphone, the app translates what you said and reads it aloud. Then the person you are conversing with can reply in their language, and it will translate what they said and read it back to you.
“This technology is still in alpha, so elements like background noise and regional accents may affect accuracy,” says product manager Jeff Chin. “But since it depends on examples to learn, the quality will improve as people use it more. We wanted to get this early version out to help start the conversation no matter where you are in the world.”
Although real-time conversation support is not the only goodie that has been distributed in Google Translate for Android (version 2.2). Additional attributes include the ability to adjust speech that Google mis-recognizes when you say it in order to correct any errors in word choice or phrasing before the app starts translating that which it thinks you have said. And if you happen to know words that Google Translate does not, you can make use of a new personal dictionary feature within the app to add context to unrecognized words.
Other attributes have been added, aimed at making it easier to speak and read while you translate. “For isntance, if you wanted to say ‘Where is the train?’ but Google Translate recognizes your speech as ‘Where is the rain?’, you can now correct the text before you translate it,” says Chin. “You can also add unrecognized words to your personal dictionary.”
“When viewing written translation results, you can tap the magnifying glass icon to view the translated text in full screen mode so you can easily show it to someone nearby, or just pinch to zoom in for a close-up view,” he adds.
However, the technology is young and unpolished, and Google Translate still has a long way to go before on-the-fly translations becomes flawless, however, anyone who has used their online translate text-to-text program knows just how well the company manages to translate complete sentences.
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