Google has updated its Translate app for Android adding support for camera input for 16 new languages including Bulgarian, Catalan, Danish, Estonian, Finnish, Croatian, Hungarian, Indonesian, Icelandic, Lithuanian, Latvian, Norwegian, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, and Swedish.
The app already supports camera input based translation for languages such as Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish.
The app update also introduces a sync-able Phrasebook. This means that users can sync saved phrases across various Android devices if they're signed-in via their Google account. The Phrasebook has replaced Favourites which were available earlier and saved phrases or words are now under one section.
Google had introduced Phrasebook,earlier this year allowing users to save translations for useful phrases.
In March, Google had
updated the Google Translate Android app with support for offline translation through offline translation packs for fifty languages, including French, Spanish, German, Hindi, Chinese, Japanese and Arabic. The app also started supporting translation of vertical text in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean through the mobile device's Camera. The offline translation packs can be downloaded through the Offline languages section in the app menu where users can browse all the offline language packages available for download.
Google Translate is a free translation service that provides translations between 65 different languages. The Android Translate app lets users input text using voice, handwriting, and camera and also enables them to listen to translations spoken aloud. Users can also save their favorite translations for quick, offline access. Google had introduced camera-input support for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean in December 2012 though it was limited to horizontal text. The camera feature was integrated in August along with Google Goggles' optical character recognition (OCR) technology, to use the camera of an Android smartphone to input text without typing.
The Translate app is also available for iOS but it hasn't been updated after March 2012.