Next, Offline Mode now works on iOS, and joins Android in using small offline packages. We know that many of you found the previous packages too big to download on unreliable data connections or to keep on your phone’s limited storage. That’s why we shrunk them by 90 percent, to a much more manageable 25 MB each.
Offline Mode is easy to set up: Just tap the arrow next to the language name to download the package for that language, and then you’ll be ready to do text translations whether you’re online or not—and it works with Tap to Translate too. We’ve just added a Filipino language pack, bringing our total number of offline languages to 52.
Finally, we’re adding Word Lens in Chinese. It’s our 29th language for instant visual translation, and it reads both to and from English, for both Simplified and Traditional Chinese. Try it on menus, signs, packages, and other printed text. As with all Word Lens languages, it works offline.
With Tap to Translate, improved Offline Mode, and Word Lens in Chinese, we hope you’ll find the latest version of Google Translate a helpful companion. These updates are rolling out over the next few days.
Posted by Barak Turovsky, Product Lead, Google Translate
7. You can see the world in your language.
Word Lens is your friend when reading menus, street signs and more. This feature in the Google Translate App lets you instantly see translations in 28 languages.
8. You can have a conversation no matter what language you speak.
In 2011, we first introduced the ability to have a bilingual conversation on Google Translate. The app will recognize which language is being spoken when you’re talking with someone, allowing you to have a natural conversation in 32 languages.
9. You don't need an Internet connection to connect.
Many countries don’t have reliable Internet, so it’s important to be able to translate on the go. You can instantly translate signs and menus offline with Word Lens on both Android and iOS, and translate typed text offline with Android.
10. There's always more to translate.
We’re excited and proud of what we’ve accomplished together over the last 10 years—but there’s lots more to do to break language barriers and help people communicate no matter where they’re from or what language they speak. Thank you for using Google Translate—here’s to another 10!
Posted by Barak Turovsky, Product Lead, Google Translate
Before you dive into translating, here are a few fun facts about the new languages:
Amharic (Ethiopia) is the second most widely spoken Semitic language after Arabic
Corsican (Island of Corsica, France) is closely related to Italian and was Napoleon's first language
Frisian (Netherlands and Germany) is the native language of over half the inhabitants of the Friesland province of the Netherlands
Kyrgyz (Kyrgyzstan) is the language of the Epic of Manas, which is 20x longer than the Iliad and the Odyssey put together
Hawaiian (Hawaii) has lent several words to the English language, such as ukulele and wiki
Kurdish (Kurmanji) (Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria) is written with Latin letters while the others two varieties of Kurdish are written with Arabic script
Luxembourgish (Luxembourg) completes the list of official EU languages Translate covers
Samoan (Samoa and American Samoa) is written using only 14 letters
Scots Gaelic (Scottish highlands, UK) was introduced by Irish settlers in the 4th century AD
Shona (Zimbabwe) is the most widely spoken of the hundreds of languages in the Bantu family
Sindhi (Pakistan and India) was the native language of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the "Father of the Nation” of Pakistan
Pashto (Afghanistan and Pakistan) is written in Perso-Arabic script with an additional 12 letters, for a total of 44
Xhosa (South Africa) is the second most common native language in the country after Afrikaans and features three kinds of clicks, represented by the letters x, q and c
We’ve come a long way with over 100 languages, but we aren’t done yet. If you want to help, International Mother Language day — just around the corner on February 21 — is a great time to get involved in Translate Community. To start, just select the languages you speak; then choose to either translate phrases on your own or validate existing translations. Every contribution helps improve the quality of translation over time. You can also share feedback directly from Translate.Google.com, so as you try out the new languages, we’d love to hear your suggestions.
For each new language, we make our translations better over time, both by improving our algorithms and systems and by learning from your translations with Translate Community. Today's update will be rolling out over the coming days.
No matter what language you speak, we hope today’s update makes it easier to communicate with millions of new friends and break language barriers one conversation at a time.
Posted by Sveta Kelman, Senior Program Manager, Google Translate
To try out Arabic with either English or German you'll be prompted to download a small (~2 MB) language pack.
Split View translations with the newest iPads
Starting today, customers using iPads supporting Split View will be able to use Google Translate along with the new feature. So if you’re sending an email or text and need to translate, you can see both apps at the same time. And it even works with text from online books or websites.
Whether you’re starting a new bi-lingual conversation on your iPad or using instant visual translation to find your way, Google Translate helps you see the world in your language. With today’s updates, we hope that we’re able to continue to help and give more translation options to the 500 million people using Google Translate to see over 100 billion words a day in their language.
Posted by Barak Turovsky, Product Lead, Google Translate
This update works on any device running the newest version of Android’s operating system (Android 6.0, Marshmallow). To get started, you first need to have the Translate app downloaded on your Android phone. From there, just go to an app, like TripAdvisor or LinkedIn, and highlight and select the text you want to translate. This feature is already enabled in apps that use Android text selection behavior. Developers who created custom text selection behavior can also easily add the new feature.
More than 500 million people translate over 100 billion words a day on Google Translate. With updates like this one, plus features like conversation mode and instant camera translation, we’re making Translate available anywhere you need it. So when you’re chatting with a new colleague from halfway around the world, conversation mode is perfect. Wondering which subway sign says “exit” on your next global adventure? Instant camera translation has your back. And now, when you’re sending messages or checking out reviews on your phone, you can translate right from within the apps you’re using.
Posted by Barak Turovsky, Product Lead, Google Translate
Google Translate covers 90 languages total (for text translation), and we are always working to expand the number of languages that work across various features. Posted by Barak Turovsky, Product Lead, Google Translate and Nathan Beach, Product Manager, Android Wear
Second, Translate has to recognize what each letter actually is. This is where deep learning comes in. We use a convolutional neural network, training it on letters and non-letters so it can learn what different letters look like.
But interestingly, if we train just on very “clean”-looking letters, we risk not understanding what real-life letters look like. Letters out in the real world are marred by reflections, dirt, smudges, and all kinds of weirdness. So we built our letter generator to create all kinds of fake “dirt” to convincingly mimic the noisiness of the real world—fake reflections, fake smudges, fake weirdness all around.
Why not just train on real-life photos of letters? Well, it’s tough to find enough examples in all the languages we need, and it’s harder to maintain the fine control over what examples we use when we’re aiming to train a really efficient, compact neural network. So it’s more effective to simulate the dirt.
Some of the “dirty” letters we use for training. Dirt, highlights, and rotation, but not too much because we don’t want to confuse our neural net.
The third step is to take those recognized letters, and look them up in a dictionary to get translations. Since every previous step could have failed in some way, the dictionary lookup needs to be approximate. That way, if we read an ‘S’ as a ‘5’, we’ll still be able to find the word ‘5uper’.
Finally, we render the translation on top of the original words in the same style as the original. We can do this because we’ve already found and read the letters in the image, so we know exactly where they are. We can look at the colors surrounding the letters and use that to erase the original letters. And then we can draw the translation on top using the original foreground color.
Crunching it down for mobile
Now, if we could do this visual translation in our data centers, it wouldn’t be too hard. But a lot of our users, especially those getting online for the very first time, have slow or intermittent network connections and smartphones starved for computing power. These low-end phones can be about 50 times slower than a good laptop—and a good laptop is already much slower than the data centers that typically run our image recognition systems. So how do we get visual translation on these phones, with no connection to the cloud, translating in real-time as the camera moves around?
We needed to develop a very small neural net, and put severe limits on how much we tried to teach it—in essence, put an upper bound on the density of information it handles. The challenge here was in creating the most effective training data. Since we’re generating our own training data, we put a lot of effort into including just the right data and nothing more. For instance, we want to be able to recognize a letter with a small amount of rotation, but not too much. If we overdo the rotation, the neural network will use too much of its information density on unimportant things. So we put effort into making tools that would give us a fast iteration time and good visualizations. Inside of a few minutes, we can change the algorithms for generating training data, generate it, retrain, and visualize. From there we can look at what kind of letters are failing and why. At one point, we were warping our training data too much, and ‘$’ started to be recognized as ‘S’. We were able to quickly identify that and adjust the warping parameters to fix the problem. It was like trying to paint a picture of letters that you’d see in real life with all their imperfections painted just perfectly.
To achieve real-time, we also heavily optimized and hand-tuned the math operations. That meant using the mobile processor’s SIMD instructions and tuning things like matrix multiplies to fit processing into all levels of cache memory.
In the end, we were able to get our networks to give us significantly better results while running about as fast as our old system—great for translating what you see around you on the fly. Sometimes new technology can seem very abstract, and it's not always obvious what the applications for things like convolutional neural nets could be. We think breaking down language barriers is one great use. Posted by Otavio Good, Software Engineer, Google Translate (Cross-posted on the Google Research Blog)
Instantly translate printed text in 27 languages
We started out with seven languages—English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish—and today we're adding 20 more. You can now translate to and from English and Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Filipino, Finnish, Hungarian, Indonesian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Slovak, Swedish, Turkish and Ukrainian. You can also do one-way translations from English to Hindi and Thai. (Or, try snapping a pic of the text you’d like translated—we have a total of 37 languages in camera mode.)
To try out the new languages, go to the Google Translate app, set “English” along with the language you’d like to translate, and click the camera button; you'll be prompted to download a small (~2 MB) language pack for each.
Ready to see all of these languages in action?
And how exactly did we get so many new languages running on a device with no data connection? It’s all about convolutional neural networks (whew)—geek out on that over on our Research blog.
Have a natural, smoother conversation—even with a slower mobile network
In many emerging markets, slow mobile networks can make it challenging to access many online tools - so if you live in an area with unreliable mobile networks, our other update today is for you. In addition to instant visual translation, we’ve also improved our voice conversation mode (enabling real-time translation of conversations across 32 languages), so it’s even faster and more natural on slow networks.
These updates are coming to both Android and iOS, rolling out over the next few days.
Translate Community helps us get better every day
On top of today’s updates, we’re also continuously working to improve the quality of the translations themselves and to add new languages. A year ago this week, we launched Translate Community, a place for multilingual people from anywhere in the world to provide and correct translations. Thanks to the millions of language lovers who have already pitched in—more than 100 million words so far!—we've been updating our translations for over 90 language pairs, and plan to update many more as our community grows.
We’ve still got lots of work to do: more than half of the content on the Internet is in English, but only around 20% of the world’s population speaks English. Today’s updates knock down a few more language barriers, helping you communicate better and get the information you need. Posted by Barak Turovsky, Product Lead, Google Translate (Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog)
So how exactly are people like you impacting Google Translate? Well, with Translate Community hundreds of thousands of people have generously donated their time in service of cross-language communication. It’s fun and really easy: tell us what languages you speak; choose to either see a phrase and translate it on your own or correct current translations already in the system. Based on translations from the community, we will incorporate corrections and over time learn the language a little better.
There’s a whole lot more work to do, but with more help from everyday people through Translate Community, we can continue to improve the 90 languages we already speak and keep adding more. Posted by Aaron Babst, Community Program Manager, Google Translate
Some of the top contributing languages were what you might expect based on the number of speakers of each language; Spanish, Russian, French and Portuguese led the way through the challenge and languages like Bengali and Vietnamese notably moved their way up the rankings.
Thank you to the I/O Extended event organizers, Google Developer Groups and everyone who contributed to improving their language in Google Translate throughout this 10-day-challenge. We're excited to continue to work together in improving Google Translate. Aaron Babst, Google Translate, Community Program Manager
Translate Community: Google I/O Challenge (May 26 - June 5, 2015)
Now, we're challenging all Google I/O attendees (onsite and offsite!) to represent your language(s) during the Translate Community: I/O Challenge running from May 26 to June 5, 2015. Our goal is to reach over 5 million total contributions during the challenge.
You can make meaningful contributions in just a few minutes, and remember that all contributions matter—we encourage you to spread the word in your local community and amongst your friends and family to increase the contributions for your language(s). More contributions mean higher quality translations for your language(s), or helping your language(s) become supported on Google Translate, if they aren’t yet.
To get started:
Sign up in the new version of Translate Community at g.co/translate/io
Set your language(s) and contribute with as many high-quality translations / validations you have time for
Invite others to join the challenge and show support for your language on social with the official #io15 & #loveyourlanguage hashtags
You can follow which languages are getting the most contributions on our Google+ page, where we’ll post updates on who's leading the way throughout the challenge. Besides helping your language rise to the top of our leaderboard, if you’re one of the top high-quality contributors, you’ll get a Google Translate certificate for your linguistic legerdemain and might even get a shoutout on our social channels.
Built with Polymer
In the spirit of Google I/O, we recently released a new version of the Translate Community using Polymer. In addition to supporting your language, be one of the first to try out the new look of Translate Community.
This new version takes advantage of Web Components in Polymer. We're one of the first teams at Google to use Polymer this way—it’s now much easier to add new features like badges, upgrade our design, and ensure it works great on smartphones and tablets, in addition to desktop. We're looking forward to leading the way by offering our community a fun and engaging place to make a positive impact. Posted by Aaron Babst, Google Translate, Community Program Manager
Google Translate Community surfaces a random selection of popular words and phrases that users are asking Google Translate to explain in their language — from music lyrics, to local recipes, to human rights.
Teaching Google Vietnamese at the University of Technology in Ho Chi Minh City
We sometimes think the offline world and online world are separate. They're not. A huge thank you to all the people that joined us for the Love your Language series of events. Your efforts have made it easier for people from downtown Dhaka to upcountry Thailand to access the web in a language they understand.
And the improvements don’t need to stop. By joining the Translate Community you can join us in making the web work better for everyone — no matter what language you speak. Posted by Svetlana Kelman, Program Manager, Google Translate (Cross-posted from the Asia Pacific Blog)
Click on our illustration on the homepage to visit the Google Translate Community where you can help add new languages to Google Translate and improve those that are currently supported. We've already seen Cantonese, Kyrgyz and Pashto speakers contribute a lot, and we hope to continue our collaboration with these communities so we can eventually add these languages.
We hope you join us for Mother Language Day to improve translation for everyone and show pride for your language. We'll be highlighting the top languages with the most contributions to Translate Community over the next 48 hours on our Google+ page. Show some love for your language and help it get to the top of the list by contributing today!
Posted by Aaron Babst, Community/Program Manager, Google Translate
Have an easier conversation using the Translate app
When talking with someone in an unfamiliar language, conversations can... get... realllllllly... sloowwww. While we’ve had real-time conversation mode on Android since 2013, our new update makes the conversation flow faster and more naturally.
Starting today, simply tap the mic to start speaking in a selected language, then tap the mic again, and the Google Translate app will automatically recognize which of the two languages are being spoken, letting you have a more fluid conversation. For the rest of the conversation, you won’t need to tap the mic again—it'll be ready as you need it. Asking for directions to the Rive Gauche, ordering bacalhau in Lisbon, or chatting with your grandmother in her native Spanish just got a lot faster.
These updates will be coming to both Android and iOS, rolling out over the next few days. This is the first time some of these advanced features, like camera translations and conversation mode, will be available for iOS users.
More than 500 million people use Google Translate every month, making more than 1 billion translations a day to more easily communicate and access information across languages. Today’s updates take us one step closer to turning your phone into a universal translator and to a world where language is no longer a barrier to discovering information or connecting with each other.
Posted by Barak Turovsky, Product Lead, Google Translate
If it weren't for the active Translate Community participation, we wouldn't be able to launch some of these languages today. While our translation system learns from translated data found on the web, sometimes we need support from humans to improve our algorithms. We're very grateful for all the support we're getting today and we hope that together with our community, we can continue improving translation quality for the languages we support today and add even more languages in the future.
Spotlight on our new languages
Africa gets more language coverage with Chichewa, Malagasy, and Sesotho:
Chichewa (Chinyanja) is spoken by 12 million people in Malawi and surrounding countries. It is one of 55 languages used in the greetings that now travel the galaxy on the Voyager interstellar probes.
Malagasy is spoken by 18 million people in Madagascar, where it is the national language. It is one of only a few languages which puts the verb first in sentences, followed by the object and then the subject.
Sesotho has 6 million native speakers. It is the national language of Lesotho and one of 11 official languages in South Africa.
In India and Southeast Asia, we are adding Malayalam, Myanmar, Sinhala, and Sundanese:
Malayalam (മലയാളം), with 38 million native speakers, is a major language in India and one of that country’s 6 classical languages. It’s been one of the most-requested languages, so we are especially excited to add Malayalam support!
Myanmar (Burmese, မြန်မာစာ) is the official language of Myanmar with 33 million native speakers. Myanmar language has been in the works for a long time as it's a challenging language for automatic translation, both from language structure and font encoding perspectives. While our system understands different Myanmar inputs, we encourage the use of open standards and therefore only output Myanmar translations in Unicode.
Sinhala (සිංහල) is one of the official languages of Sri Lanka and natively spoken by 16 million people. In September the local community in Sri Lanka organized Sinhala Translate Week, and since then, participants have contributed tens of thousands of translations to our system. We're happy to be able to release Sinhala as one of the new languages today!
Sundanese (Basa Sunda) is spoken on the island of Java in Indonesia by 39 million people. While Sundanese does have its own script, it is today commonly written using the Latin alphabet, which is what our system uses.
In Central Asia, we are adding Kazakh, Tajik, and Uzbek:
Kazakh (Қазақ тілі) with 11 million native speakers in Kazakhstan. We've received strong support from Kazakh language enthusiasts, and we hope to continue collaborating with the local communities in the region to add even more languages in the future, including Kyrgyz.
Tajik (Тоҷикӣ), a close relative to modern Persian, is spoken by more than 4 million people in Tajikistan and beyond.
Uzbek (Oʻzbek tili)is spoken by 25 million people in Uzbekistan. In addition to receiving Uzbek community support, we've incorporated the Uzbek dictionary by Shavkat Butaev into our system.
We’re just getting started with these new languages and have a long way to go. You can help us by suggesting your corrections using "Improve this translation" functionality on Translate and contributing to Translate Community.
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