Google is making it even easier to get around a foreign city when you travel. The Google Translate app for Android got a major update allowing you to take a photo of a sign or even a menu, and translate it into another language. Now you never have to sit in a café unable to read the menu and wonder "what is it I just ordered?"
Here's how it works.
Using your phone's camera, point to the text you want translated, and take a picture. Then freeze the image and swipe the words you want translated (see the image above).
Google can translate the text into Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portugese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish. The company says it's working to add more languages to the list.
You can still use Google Translate to type your desired text into one of the 64 languages supported. But Google Goggles’ optical character recognition (OCR) technology is limited to those listed above.
Google says in a blog post that OCR "makes Google Translate for Android one of our most intelligent and machine learning-intensive apps."
There are apps that already do this; Word Lens is a popular one, but it costs $4.99.
Google Translate is available for free in the Google Play store for Android 2.1 and up.
Do you use language translation apps when you travel? Let us know in the comments.