Google makes it less likely that you'll talk to strangers while traveling
In the olden days, when you were on a subway in another country and couldn’t read the signs due to not speaking the language, you’d approach a stranger and use gesturing to figure out where to go. That kind of “cultural exchange” may go extinct, however, thanks to Google’s giving us our own Babel fish, the universal translator dreamt up in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. On Wednesday, Google announced that its Translate smartphone app is now going to support about 30 different languages.
Those with the Google Translate app on their smartphone can point their device’s camera at something with a foreign language printed on it, and the app translates it instantly. Likewise, you can record a question or statement, hit translate, and a Google spokesbot emerges from your speakers.
The previous version of the app included English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish. Now, the app, which no longer requires Internet connectivity to work, can translate to and from English and Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Filipino, Finnish, Hungarian, Indonesian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Slovak, Swedish, Turkish and Ukrainian. It also works with Hindi and Thai, but only if you’re starting with English. Google will be rolling out updates to its Android and iOS apps over the next few days. (Google is banned in China, so that might explain why the most widely spoken language in the world didn’t make the app update, though the web version of the service does support it. “With instant visual translation, we select languages based on a number of factors – ranging from the usage and demand of the language to the difficulty of the characters. For example, Latin characters are easier for our systems to understand than Chinese,” a Google spokesperson told Fusion.*)
Basically, Google is making it easier for us to not have to learn the languages spoken in the countries we visit. So far, people are using the thing mostly to translate street signs, ingredient lists, menus, instruction manuals, and dials on a washing machines, according to Google. Think about it. You’re on the subway by yourself, you need to find out what the signs say quickly so you don’t miss your stop. It’s so much easier to point your phone at something, than muster up the energy to talk to a stranger. Same thing when you’re trying to figure out if the food you want to eat will mess with your gluten allergy or paleo diet. Better to point your phone and figure it out yourself, than try to explain to the waiter the many things you can’t eat.