Los Angeles — Everyday the web is spreading out to more countries, making it difficult to converse with people, hence translations has becoming even more important. Google on Tuesday, extended its much-loved Translate service with a bundle of useful new features. The service can now translate around 51 different languages, and some interesting features, but Google took it to the next level with a completely overhauled interface.
The biggest feature and the most useful one is the new real-time translation, allowing you to get the results instantly. Once you enter the text in the text box, the translation in your chosen language will automatically appear underneath, no need to press the “Translate” button. Oddly, though, the “Translate” button is still present.
“Today, we have rolled out three new features as well as a new look and feel for Google Translate–a service that will aid people to access information throughout the world by enabling them to automatically translate text and web pages into their own language. Google Translate offers 51 languages, representing over 98% of Internet users today,” Awaneesh Verma, product manager for Google Translate, wrote. “Along with our shiny new layout, these new features should make it faster and easier for you to translate text between our 2550 language pairs.”
Another new feature is the ability to read and write any language. Basically, you can just enter a word that you are unable to read, and click “Show Romanization” to read the text written phonetically in English.
The tool can now display Chinese characters written phonetically in English but excludes support for Hebrew, Arabic, and Persian at the moment. This feature would be particularly useful if you do not have the respective script on your keyboard, as you can type the words as they sound and convert them to native script.
Finally, the new Google Translate lets you hear translations spoken by clicking a little speaker icon. But the second one is the biggy – for Arabic, Persian and Hindi you can type words as they sound to convert them to native script in that language. That could be pretty useful if you’re not packing a native keyboard.
Google says “We hope these improvements will make reading, learning and communicating in foreign languages easier and more fun”. You can watch the new Google Translate in action in this brief video demo of the revamped service: