iOS: The iPhone has had a mobile-formatted Google Translate webapp for a while, but as of today they have a new native app with even more features, including speak-to-translate, offline storage, and the ability to hear your translations pronounced out loud.
iOS: Word Lens is an app for your iPhone or iPod touch that translates any Spanish or English text your camera can see. And it does it on the fly. And it’s amazing.
“Bandwidth” really means time or people. “Get down in the weeds” is the goofy way of asking to focus on details, and “Preso“, well, it’s just cringe-inducing. Web directory Unsuck It pulls off such management-to-actual-human translations with clarity and sometimes hilarity.
Android: Google’s Goggles app for Android can now translate foreign text that you capture (and crop) with your phone’s camera, potentially helping with signage, papers and other text found while travelling. In a quick test, it fared, well, interesting.
Windows/Mac: VoxOx is a snazzy chat and social networking app for keeping in touch with your friends. We’ve mentioned it before, but VoxOx is even more useful now that it has a real-time translation tool.
Using its vast compendium of voice and translation data, Google appears to be working toward a semi-real-time, or “speech-to-speech”, translation technology for future phone models, according to The Times UK.
Need a quick MP3 file of a certain saying to goof on a co-worker? Whatever your needs, Google Translate can be used as an impromptu text-to-speech converter, providing a handy MP3 file of your chosen words.
Google has recently offered translation of web pages generated from JavaScript—like search results and webapps—through its own toolbars. Want to quickly translate text without the toolbar? The Google Operating System blog has a bookmarklet to try out.
Google Translate added a few features to its main web home, including instant translations as you type. What’s really helpful is a bit more tucked away: phonetic pronunciations for non-Roman alphabets, like Chinese and text-to-speech pronunciations for translating to English.
