Google Goes Native with Translate iPhone App

One of Google's lofty missions is to open up the web to everyone. One way it's doing this is with all of the work it's doing on machine translation. The results of that work don't always have to do with the web directly though, like the brand new Google Translate app for iPhone.

Google Translate for iPhone should be seen more like a personal, mobile translator. It enables you to translate text you may encounter in the real world or even understand what other people are saying.

"The official Google Translate for iPhone app is available for download from the App Store. The new app has all of the features of the web app, plus some significant new additions designed to improve your overall translation experience," Wenzhang Zhu, Software Engineer at Google, announced.

One of the big new features is the ability to do voice translations. Simply speak the words you want translated and Google will provide the translated version.

This only works for 15 languages so far, but it's still a useful feature. The app can then translate the voice input into more than 50 languages.

Even better, it can 'speak' back the translation as well since the app supports voice syntheses for 23 languages. This way, you can use Google Translate as a make-shift interpreter enabling you to establish at least some form of communication in many places around the world.

With this in mind, the translation can also go full screen, focusing on the translated text alone, making it easier for someone else to see what you are trying to say.

A web-based version of Google Translate has been available for the iPhone for a couple of years now, but Google has now changed strategies and will focus on native apps, at least for the short term.

This means that you can expect a lot more native apps for all Google services on all platforms in the not so distant future. Google also plans to release apps unrelated to its existing products, even games, so the web seems to be taking a back seat, at least for now on the mobile front.