Thursday, October 13, 2011

Google Gets One Step Closer To A Real Babelfish

Mountain View-based Google has gotten one step closer to the fictional "babel fish", the character in the Douglas Adams book The Hitchiker's Guide To The Galaxy, which instantly translates between spoken languages. In the latest update to Google's Google Translate for Android app, the firm said it now supports fourteen languages in the app, translating speech back and forth between not only English and Spanish, but also Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Polish, Russian and Turkish. The new translations are now supported in "Conversation Mode", which automatically translates between what you say and any of the languages supported. A beta of the feature had launched earlier this year, but only supported English and Spanish.