Google has become the answer for many things, have a question… just ask Google. The same goes when you are traveling internationally and you do not understand the language. You can ask Google and it will translate whatever you are looking for. This can completely revolutionize the way that you travel because you can now feel confident in your ability to communicate without hesitation in a language different than your own.

How It Works

Google Translate is an application that offers multilingual statistical translation. It offers translation of many different languages including Chinese, German, Greek, Korean, Polish, Russian, and Dutch. Google Translate can directly translate not only printed word, but handwriting as well. It also can directly translate speech when spoken, which lets the user hear their translations spoken back to them. It is compatible with iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. It operates the best when using iPhone 5. There are extensions available for Firefox and Google Chrome. It is also available on Android.

Developer

Google Inc. is the developer of Google Translate. The application was first developed in late 2008 and has continued to go through developmental changes to make it better for the overall user experience.

Price

Google Translate is a free application available for your smartphone that makes translating easy and mobile.

Pros/Cons

Google Translate has many beneficial features that are easy to use. A great feature that it includes is a way of gaining quick access to your favorite translations while offline. It can help with quick look-ups for translations, translating written words and larger paragraphs. The text-to-speech function is also available for the more commonly used languages. It is also undergoing a large restructuring as the application is joining forces with Word Lens. This will gives users more ways of capturing their translations including using the camera in their phone for easy screen shot translation. Google Translate also has many languages available for translation, where many other translation applications are quite limited in the languages that they offer for translating.

It does have some limitations including that not all languages provide the same quality of translations. It is relatively accurate but there will be problems with some cultural sayings and has grammatical errors.

Google Translate has become one of the most beloved translation applications for Smartphones, undoubtedly due to the amount of languages available and the relationship consumers have built with Google. It will be exciting to see how Google Translate and Word Lens work together in the future as a combined translation tool.