Google Translate is an app that's been critical to my success when travelling in other countries. When you don't speak the language (or don't speak the language well) somewhere you're travelling, being able to quickly look something up, or speak into the phone to create a translation you can use to chat with that guy on the street can be a lifesaver.

Yesterday at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona Samsung unveiled the Galaxy S9, its newest flagship smartphone.

Google's Pixel Buds are more than a pair of wireless earbuds. Equipped with an inbuilt language translator and assorted Google AI tricks, they promise to be essential travel accessories - particularly when holidaying or working abroad. If you're keen to get your hands on some, here is the pricing, specifications and release date for Australia!

Thanks to fancy new upgrades like neural network learning, translation apps like Google Translate and Microsoft Translator are better than ever. They can translate almost anything you want. But you shouldn't lean on them when you travel. In fact, I think you should use them as little as possible -- if at all.

If you need to translate some text, Google Translate will usually get you in the ballpark, but it's not perfect. Now, the company hopes to vastly improve its translations with neural learning.

Whether you're a globetrotter, language student, or business owner, tools like Google Translate and Microsoft Translator make it easier for everyone in the world to understand one another. But while both can translate text, speech, and images, they still each have their own quirks. So all aboard the showdown train! Next stop: translation station.

Android/iOS: Google's rolling out big updates for Google Translate apps on Android and iOS. Most notably, the iOS version now supports an offline mode, but Android also gets a handy new Tap to Translate button.

Google's Translate has added support for an additional 20 languages to its repository, meaning it can now do real-time, data-connection-free translation of just about anything you see.

Communicating with someone who speaks and writes in another language isn't the easiest task. This Google Sheet incorporates Google Translate so you can have a real-time chat conversation with anybody in the world.

Brief news items of note for Lifehacker readers including: Watch the final Pacific Rim trailer, Microsoft updates Skype, Google Translate needs Māoris.

Android: Google Translate for Android just picked up the ability to snapshot and understand 16 additional languages, just by using your camera. Plus, you can now build a phrasebook of useful terms and phrases for quick reference.

Phrasebook is a new tool for Google Translate that lets you keep useful and popular phrases stored on your phone for quicker access. The days of sheepishly fumbling on your phone in front of bemused locals are about to be over. C'est si bon!

Android: The Google Translate app for Android got a huge update yesterday: now if you take a photo of a sign, menu, or any other text in another language using your Android device, you can tell the app to try and translate it based on a selection of the text that you specify. The app will try and interpret the characters from your image and will automatically translate the text into your preferred language for you.

Google's web apps can translate uploaded Microsoft Office documents, but with many caveats involving file sizes and HTML formatting. DocTranslator, a Java-powered web app, runs your Office and text documents through Google Translate and sends them back with the same formatting.

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 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.

Google hasn't made it official, but PC World/IDG News Service and the Google Operating System blog are totally convinced that Gmail will get multi-language, on-the-fly translation of their email messages at an event in Brussels to celebrate Gmail's fifth birthday. The screenshot above, hot off Google's servers, seems to give away the meaning of Google's event description as having "a European multilingual angle." As soon as it happens, you know we'll try it out; in the meantime, we're wondering if Gmail has anything else in store to release today.

Google Operating System points out a minor but useful change at Google: its Translate option is now available from the main 'More' dropdown on the home screen for most international Google home pages (including google.com.au), so you can translate simply by typing a phrase in the search box and selecting 'Translate'. With that said, the language detection still doesn't always work (in the example pictured, Google identified the phrase as French but offered back the identical phrase as the translation into English), but it does save a few steps. For another novel way to use Google for translations, try using Image Search instead.Google Translate, Added to the Navigation Menu