An interesting update to Google Translate just made it easier to use if you’re an Android user.
Before the update, if you were reading something, and came across a language you didn’t understand, you’d have to copy the text, start the translate app, paste it in, and get your results. A new feature, “Tap To Translate” simply keys the translation app to the navigation action of tapping. Simply tap the text that you can’t read, and the app takes it from there.
In the same update that rolled out this feature, Google also bolstered the offline functioning of the translation app, so even if you can’t get a cell or internet signal, and aren’t connected, you can still get texts translated.
Google has been, historically, very responsive when it comes to adding features and making changes to products in their ecosystem that make using them easier and more convenient, and this is certainly no exception.
Although it might be hard to name a specific date and time when it occurred, at some point, the term “global community” stopped being a catch phrase, and started to be the reality. As such, apps like Google’s translation app are absolutely essential in helping us understand the ocean of texts in different languages almost anyone is likely to come across in the course of a single day.
Even if you stick fairly closely to American websites, you can easily find yourself looking at a smattering of texts in French, German, and even Arabic, so it just makes sense to have a good, convenient, easy to use, and accurate translation app at the ready, so you know exactly what you’re looking at, and you don’t have to spend a lot of time getting to that point.
Not to say that Google never missteps, but a company looking for a guiding light and source of inspiration about how to work to continuously upgrade their products to make them increasingly user friendly, Google continues to make strides and this is just another case of unifying communications across barriers.
