Google Translate Now Supports Handwriting Characters

Google is making it easier to make sense of the world with a new feature for its Google Translate mobile app. It is now possible to draw characters or words and have them translated.

It works with Chinese and Japanese hanzi/kanji but can also be enabled for other languages. The feature should come in handy when it's just easier to write what you want translated.

"With our most recent update to Google Translate for Android, we’ve added an experimental new input feature: handwriting on your touchscreen," Daniel Keysers, software engineer at Google, announced.

"Our goal is to break down the language barrier, all the time, everywhere. By adding handwriting input directly into our Android app we hope to help you get translation done even more quickly and easily," he explained.

"Sometimes you don’t know how to say what you want translated, sometimes you can’t type it, and sometimes it’s easier just to write it," he added.

There are already several ways of getting things translated, you can type it on your keyboard of course, you can use the microphone to have someone speak the words you want translated and you can even use a photo of the text, though you'll have to use a different app, Google Goggles for this.

The latest version of the Android Translate app features a new "write" button. Hitting it brings up the drawing interface. The app accepts Chinese and Japanese characters, one at a time, but it can be enabled for English, French, Italian, German and Spanish.

As expected, the character recognition happens in the cloud and not in the app, locally. This make sense since Google can make improvements and adjustments to the feature without having to update the app all of the time, one of the main reasons why Google prefers web apps to native ones.