Google Translate

Category
Reference

Description of App

• Translate between 103 languages by typing • Offline: Translate 52 languages when you have no Internet • Instant camera translation: Use your camera to translate text instantly in 29 languages • Camera Mode: Take pictures of text for higher-quality translations in 37 languages • Conversation Mode: Two-way instant speech translation in 32 languages • Handwriting: Draw characters instead of using the keyboard in 93 languages Translations between the following languages are supported: Afrikaans, Albanian, Amharic, Arabic, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Basque, Belarusian, Bengali, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Cebuano, Chichewa, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Corsican, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Frisian, Galician, Georgian, German, Greek, Gujarati, Haitian Creole, Hausa, Hawaiian, Hebrew, Hindi, Hmong, Hungarian, Icelandic, Igbo, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Javanese, Kannada, Kazakh, Khmer, Korean, Kurdish (Kurmanji), Kyrgyz, Lao, Latin, Latvian, Lithuanian, Luxembourgish, Macedonian, Malagasy, Malay, Malayalam, Maltese, Maori, Marathi, Mongolian, Myanmar (Burmese), Nepali, Norwegian, Pashto, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Romanian, Russian, Samoan, Scots Gaelic, Serbian, Sesotho, Shona, Sindhi, Sinhala, Slovak, Slovenian, Somali, Spanish, Sundanese, Swahili, Swedish, Tajik, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Uzbek, Vietnamese, Welsh, Xhosa, Yiddish, Yoruba, Zulu

Version

5.0.0

Free or Paid

Free

Apple Watch Support

No

Device(s) App Was Tested On

iPhone

iOS Version

9.3.1

Accessibility Comments

For the most part it is very accessible to use. However, there are some elements after a translation that appears but VoiceOver only recognize those as clicks.

VoiceOver Performance

VoiceOver reads most page elements.

Button Labeling

All buttons are clearly labeled.

Usability

There are some minor accessibility issues with this app, but they are easy to deal with.

App Store Link

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/google-translate/id414706506?mt=8&ign-mpt=uo%3D4

Developer's Website

https://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1075927

Developer's Twitter Username

@googleaccess

Related Podcast

http://www.applevis.com/podcast/episodes/google-translate-ios-translate-your-vo…

Recommendations

1 people have recommended this app

Most recently recommended by Lily Rose 2 years 2 months ago

Options

Comments

By Jim D on Monday, February 21, 2011 - 14:58

I agree with this review, this is a great app that is usable with VoiceOver. The TTS voices I have heard are good. I have dictated several phrases using the speech recognition feature and they have all come out perfectly. My next test for this app, find a spanish speaking radio station and see what they are saying!

By Esther on Monday, March 21, 2011 - 14:58

People who are in countries that don't have access to the Dragon Dictation app, or who use languages outside of the ones supported by Dragon (currently English, German, French, Spanish, Italian. and Japanese), might consider using this app to transcrbe spoekn text. For example, choose your spoken language as the first button in the language translation pair (i.e., the "Translate from" language). Double tap the "GMA icon mic" button to speak your text. Then, flick left back to the "swap language" button that lies between the buttons for the "Translate from" and "Translate to" languages, and double tap. Flick to the "TTS button" in the "Translate to" part of the screen and double tap it to have the text you dictated read back to you. (You can either quickly flick right, or else navigate to the last element of the screen and flick left three times to reach the "TTS button".) Normally, Google Translate does not read back text you dictate -- there's only the "GMA icon mic" button for recording in the top of the screen for the "translate from" language, and the "TTS" button in the bottom of the screen to announce the translated text. It's assumed that you will just read the transcribed text that appears in the text box at the top, or make editing corrections there. By using the "swap language" button you've switched the input and output text, so you can use the "TTS" button to have the app read back what you've just dictated. This is a way to get text entered and spoken text read out for additional languages, such as Arabic, Hindi, and Chinese.. You need to be able to review the voice recognition, but then you can copy and paste the transcribed text. I find the accuracy of voice recognition better with Nuance's speech recognition engine in Dragon, but this does not work badly, and also handles some other language versons (such as Haitian Creole French). Some of the recognized/spoken languages (in addition to the set Dragon handles) are: Arabic, Chinese (simplied and traditional characters), Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, Turkish. And note that you shoutd be able to copy and paste the transscribed text.

By AnonyMouse on Friday, February 21, 2014 - 14:58

Member of the AppleVis Editorial Team

Still mostly accessible. There are a lot of porrly label buttons but are easily to understand in what they do. Works as advertised and still a great app for translation.

What's New in Version 2.1.0

• Native iOS 7 support: new keyboard and status bar
• Handwriting input for more languages: Arabic, Esperanto, Gujarati, Hebrew, Javanese, Maltese, Maori, Marathi, Persian, Punjabi, Telugu, Zulu

 

By AnonyMouse on Wednesday, January 21, 2015 - 14:58

Member of the AppleVis Editorial Team

This is pretty cool to try out. The first thing you will find is that there are some VoiceOver accessibilities issue with this version. There are some areas you will find elements that will not do anything but a click. Plus, there are some unlabeled buttons in some areas of the app. Lastly, you will need to use the touch around the screen because swiping left or right will not work. However, I didn't find it hard to do what I wanted. For example, doing the LIVE voice translation is quite remarkable. I can start in english and then it is follow by what I said in the language I had it set to. Now speak in the language like Spanish and then it will speak it back in English. Very awesome. Remember that you can also use the camera to take a picture of something you want to capture and translate back to you. So a very fastinating app to try out. So a job well done by Google. Now we just need some work for the VoiceOver portion of the app.

What's New in Version 3.1.0

• Word Lens: Just point your camera to a sign or text and the Translate app will instantly translate the text, even without Internet/data connection. Currently
available in: English ↔ French, English ↔ German, English ↔ Italian, English ↔ Portuguese, English ↔ Russian, English ↔ Spanish.
• Camera Mode: Snap a photo, highlight the text, and get a translation. Currently available in 36 languages.
• Automatic language detection in speech/conversation mode - start translating with speech input and Translate will recognize which of the two languages
is being spoken, allowing you to have a more fluid conversation with another person.

By Lifestar on Wednesday, January 21, 2015 - 14:58

Great job on making voice translaton available, but in this version I can not select languages when performing text translation. Has anyone found a solution for that? How do you choose original and translation languages in the text translation part of the app?

By AnonyMouse on Saturday, March 21, 2015 - 14:58

Member of the AppleVis Editorial Team

A very nice update indeed!

What's New in Version 3.3.0

• Improved stability. Fixed crash bugs.
• Improved support for the VoiceOver screen reader.
• Word Lens: Just point your camera to a sign or text and the Translate app will instantly translate the text, even without Internet/data connection. Currently
available in: English ⇄ French, English ⇄ German, English ⇄ Italian, English ⇄ Portuguese, English ⇄ Russian, English ⇄ Spanish.
• Camera Mode: Snap a photo, highlight the text, and get a translation. Currently available in 36 languages.
• Automatic language detection in speech/conversation mode - start translating with speech input and Translate will recognize which of the two languages
is being spoken, allowing you to have a more fluid conversation with another person.

By MarkSarch on Monday, September 21, 2015 - 14:58

Updated
September 2nd
Version
4.1.0
What's New in Version 4.1.0
Improved stability. Fixed crash bugs.
Smoother conversation in 40 languages. Improved accessibility support.
Instantly translate printed text in 20 new languages with your camera:
TO/FROM English:
Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Filipino, Finnish, Hungarian, Indonesian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Slovak, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian
FROM English to:
Hindi, Thai

By Holger Fiallo on Monday, September 21, 2015 - 14:58

I used it but found it to be complicated. I found the one from microsoft.com translator to be easy and more acessible. Check it out.

By AnonyMouse on Saturday, May 21, 2016 - 14:58

Member of the AppleVis Editorial Team

What's New in Version 5.0.0

Offline translation in 52 languages
Instant camera translation: English to/from Chinese (Simplified and Traditional)
13 new languages

By That Blind Canuck on Saturday, July 21, 2018 - 14:58

Hi to everyone,

I was wondering if anyone here uses Google Translate a lot? I occasionally use it for work when translating items from English to French. Being a french speaking person, sometimes, you kind of need help translating on some tricky words or sentences.

Now one feature I use to love with Google Translate is that you could have a translation of a live conversation. What you would usually need to do is open the app, select the languages you would like to translate and tap on the "Translate Conversation" button, you are then brought to another window, where you would have buttons at the bottom, one called "Listen" and the other two were the languages you had selected previously. When brought to this window, you would also hear a chime indicating that the app is listening. You could then say something in the language you would like to translate from and the app would repeat it, with a nice female robotic voice,the same sentence in the language you wanted it to translate to. Being a French Canadian, let's just say I would select to translate from English to French. Now afgter the app would translate that first sentence, if you tapped on the "Listen" button, then the mic would stay on and you could then have one person speaking English, then have the app translate your sentence in French, then have the other person speaking French, respond and then have the app translate their response in English, then you could simply continue speaking back and forth until you stopped the app.

Now all of this to say that, wanting to show this to a colleague, I tried it and this time, it doesn't seem to work anymore. I can start the live listen and speak something in English and have it translated in French, but when I would say something in French, it would repeat, sometimes not even the same words, but in French. Almost as if the app would listen to my French sentence, thinking it was being said in English and would try to translate it into French.

Now I don't know if anyone else uses this feature, I know I don't always use it, but it can be handy at times, but has anyone else encountered this bug?

Thanks!