For some reason, Google Translate now has a limit of 5000 characters per translation. There's even a character counter at the bottom of the input box. If you happen to paste a long text that has more than 5000 characters, you'll get an error message ("maximum characters exceeded: X characters over 5000 maximum") and a "translate more" option that lets you translate the rest of the text.


I don't understand the purpose of this restriction, considering that Google doesn't impose any limitation when translating web pages. It's worth pointing out that Google Translate's API has a similar limitation: "the maximum size of each text to be translated is 5000 characters, not including any HTML tags". Google's translation card from Google Search has a different limit: about 2800 characters.

Google Translate's site for desktop and mobile now shows suggestions and autocompletes your text, much like Google Search. This works for English, French, Italian, Spanish, German, Portuguese, but you have to manually pick the input language instead of relying on automatic detection.


The new feature helps you translate faster common phrases, words and expressions, but it's not very useful for long texts.


For example, I picked French as the input language, typed "k" and one of the suggestions was "kinésithérapeute", which means "physiotherapist".


It also works when you use the mobile site:


{ Thanks, Emanuele Bartolomucci. }

If you search for a word in a foreign language, Google now automatically shows the translation. For example, you can search for [amanecer] to get the English translation of the Spanish word, instead of typing [translate amanecer] or [translate amanecer to english].


This only works for words, and some expressions, not for longer texts. It works for [buenas noches], but not for [buenas noches señora], so you'll still have to search for [translate buenas noches señora] or [buenas noches señora to english].

Google Translate added a few years ago a "select all" button that automatically selected the translation, so you could easily copy the text and paste it in an email message, a document or somewhere else. In Chrome, the "select all" has been replaced with a new "copy" button that selects the entire translation and copies the text to the clipboard. The nice thing is that this feature uses HTML5, not Flash. Unfortunately, the new feature is only available in Chrome and all the other browsers still get the old "select all" button.


You can still click the star button to save a translation to the phrasebook or copy the URL generated by Google Translate, which includes the original text.

{ Thanks, Alireza Eskandarpour Shoferi. }

Google bought Word Lens last year and brought a very useful feature to Google Translate: real-time visual translation. Use a phone or a tablet running Android or iOS, point the camera at a sign or text in a foreign language and Google will translate the text almost instantly, while preserving all the other details. It's like using a magic camera that translates text and lets you read street signs, restaurant menus, user manuals, newspaper articles even if they're written in foreign languages.

Visual translation now supports 20 additional languages. "You can now 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. You can also do one-way translations from English to Hindi and Thai." Back in January, the feature was launched with only 7 supported languages: English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.



This feature requires to pick the right languages before tapping the camera button and one of the languages must be English. You'll probably be prompted to download a small language pack, since you can use Word Lens offline.

Google Research Blog has more information about Word Lens. After finding the text regions in the picture, Google recognizes the letters using a convolutional neural network. "Letters out in the real world are marred by reflections, dirt, smudges, and all kinds of weirdness. So we built our letter generator to create all kinds of fake 'dirt' to convincingly mimic the noisiness of the real world—fake reflections, fake smudges, fake weirdness all around." After recognizing the letters, Google translates the text taking into account that text recognition might include mistakes, then it "renders the translation on top of the original words in the same style as the original". Google actually erases the original text using the colors surrounding the text and draws the translation using the initial foreground color. It's quite clever.

Here's a funny demo:

Emanuele Bartolomucci, a reader of this blog, noticed an interesting feature in Google Translate. If you click the "listen" button next to the text you want to translate or the translation, Google converts the text into speech. Click "listen" again and the speed decreases, probably because Google assumes that you are listening again to better get the correct pronunciation. It's like asking Google: "Could you speak more slowly, please?"


If you click "listen" the third time, Google goes back to the normal speed. Click again and the speed decreases. The two text-to-speech versions alternate.

I've checked Google Translate's URLs and the second version has the following parameter: "ttsspeed=0.24", which changes the text-to-speech speed.

{ Thanks, Emanuele. }

While other Google services remove integration with Google+, Google Translate added a prominent link to its own Google+ page. The Google+ icon is placed next to the Phrasebook icon, at the top of of the page. It will be interesting to see how long it will last.


{ Thanks, Alireza Eskandarpour Shoferi. }

Google Translate Community has a new interface powered by Material Design. It's a site that helps Google improve the quality of Google Translate. "Your help will enhance translations for millions of users," informs Google.

The new interface is more colorful and uses more images. There's a hamburger-style menu, a section that shows your stats and the badges you've earned. You can select 2 to 5 languages, including a few languages that aren't yet available in Google Translate like: Cantonese, Cherokee, Corsican, Tibetan, Guarani, Hawaiian and more. Then you only need to translate some phrases or rate translations.





Google also offers a simplified version of the Translate Community site, which uses the old interface.

Google Translate's mobile apps are about to get a major upgrade. The latest version of the Google Translate app for iOS and Android adds support for instant translation with Word Lens and improves the conversation mode. The iOS app also adds support for conversation mode and camera translation, which were already available in the Android app.

"While using the Translate app, just point your camera at a sign or text and you'll see the translated text overlaid on your screen - even if you don't have an Internet or data connection. This instant translation currently works for translation from English to and from French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish, and we're working to expand to more languages," informs Google. There's already camera translation, which works in 36 languages, but the new Word Lens is smarter and easier to use. Google bought Word Lens last year and this is the first tangible result of the acquisition.


Conversation Mode is smarter too: the app will now recognize the languages automatically, so you don't have to tap the microphone button. "Starting today, simply tap the mic to start speaking in a selected language, then tap the mic again, and the Google Translate app will automatically recognize which of the two languages are being spoken, letting you have a more fluid conversation. For the rest of the conversation, you won't need to tap the mic again - it'll be ready as you need it," explains Google.



The new version of the Google Translate app for Android and iOS is rolling out over the next few days.

Google Translate has a cool Easter Egg for Christmas: when translating "Happy holidays" or "Santa Claus", Google shows an image of Santa Claus and links to Google's Santa Tracker.


{ Thanks, Emanuele Bartolomucci. }

Google Translate now supports 90 languages and there are 10 new languages: Chichewa, Malagasy, Sesotho, Malayalam, Myanmar (Burmese), Sinhala, Sundanese, Kazakh, Tajik and Uzbek. "These 10 new languages will allow more than 200 million additional people to translate text to and from their native languages," informs Google.


The Translate Community feature helped Google improve its algorithms for some of the new languages. Regular users can help Google translate words and phrases, evaluate translation quality, validate translations and choose a better translation. In fact, one of the indicators for adding a new language to Google Translate is: "Speakers of the languages are eager to partner with us and offer their language expertise through Community tasks".



{ Thanks, Emanuele Bartolomucci. }

Chrome has a built-in translation feature, so why would you install an extension for Google Translate? You can select text from a page, click the small Google Translate icon and get the translation almost instantly.


You can also click the extension's button and type some text you want to translate or click "translate this page".


The nice thing about the extension is that you can change your primary language in the extension's settings without changing your browser's interface language or your operating system's language. For example, Chrome for Mac "determines the browser interface language by the Language & Text setting in System Preferences."


"The Translate team is working hard to connect people by breaking language barriers across computers, mobile devices and Internet browsers. Our users make more than 1 billion translations a day," informs the Google Translate blog.

The updated translation card for Google Search provides many of the features of the Google Translate site. Just search Google for [translate], pick the destination language, type the text you want to translate and Google translates the text in real time. By default, Google detects the language automatically.


Until now, you could have searched Google for [translate X into LANGUAGENAME]. Google only processes the first 32 words from a query, so you couldn't translate long texts. Now you can type or paste long texts in the translation card.


There's still a limit, so you might see this message: "Text exceeds character limit. Open in Google Translate to see translation".

For more advanced features, click "open in Google Translate" below the card.

Google updated the translation card and made it more useful and more interactive. When you search for [translate hello to italian] or other similar queries, Google lets you change the input language and the translation language, switch between the two languages, edit the text you want to translate, listen to the translated text and find alternate translations.



If you use the mobile interface, you can also enable a full screen mode.



This screenshot shows the full screen mode in Chrome for Android:


Here's the old Google Translate card:


{ Thanks, Herin. }

Google Translate experiments with displaying definitions for the words you're translating. Jérémy Heleine noticed the new feature, which shows a list of definitions, synonyms, examples and related words and snippets. Google also suggests a related translation ("see also").


Definitions and synonyms are also displayed in Google Search, but they're useful in Google Translate too. In addition to using Google Translate as a dictionary, you could improve your translation by picking a better synonym, a context or a more appropriate expression. For example, instead of using "Hello", you could translate "Hi" or "Howdy" and you'll get different translations.

Google Search even lets you translate words when searching for definitions. Search for [define hello], expand the dictionary card and you'll see a section called "translation hello to". Another option is to search for [translate hello into french].


{ Thanks, Frédéric Pereira. }

Google Translate now lets you edit translations. Click the "Improve" icon below the translation, edit the text and click "Contribute". Google shows this message: "Your contribution will be used to improve translation quality and may be shown to users anonymously".

Until now, you could only click the words from the translations and pick one of the alternate translations offered by Google.



{ Thanks, Emanuele Bartolomucci. }

This is pretty useful. When you translate a noun, Google Translate now shows the proper definite article. For example, when you translate "person" into Portuguese, Google displays multiple translations: "a pessoa", "o homem", "a mulher" and more. Google actually translates "the person".


When there are too many translations, Google collapses the list.


{ Thanks, Camilo. }

Google Translate supports 9 new languages: Hausa (Nigeria, 35 million speakers), Igbo (Nigeria, 25 million speakers), Yoruba (Nigeria, 28 million speakers), Somali (Somalia, 17 million speakers), Zulu (South Africa, 10 million speakers), Mongolian (Mongolia, China, 6 million speakers), Nepali (Nepal, India, Bhutan 17 million speakers), Punjabi (India, Pakistan, 100 million speakers), Maori (New Zealand, 160,000 speakers). Google Translate now supports 80 languages and that's impressive.


According to Ethnologue, there are 80 languages with more than 10 million native speakers, 200 languages with at least 3 million speakers and 1,300 languages with at least 100,000 speakers. Google Translate supports all the languages with more than 100 million native speakers, 13 of the 16 languages that have between 50 and 100 million speakers, 4 of the 13 languages that have between 30 and 50 million speakers and 15 of the 47 languages that have between 10 and 30 million speakers.

You might remember "Google in Your Language", the Google feature that allowed you to translate Google services. It was a great way to help Google support new languages, but you could also use it to find new Google features.

It looks like the translation console will be back. There's a Google Community Translation page that links to a Chrome extension which is not available.


I searched for the extension ID and found a Chrome log with information about the extension: "Tool for providing translations and corrections for Google products". The name of the extension is "Google in Your Language".


{ Thanks, Florian K. }

Google Translate has a new compact interface that combines the drop-downs that allow you to select the language pairs with the tabs that show the last 3 languages you've selected.


Here's the old interface:


Usually Google does a good job at detecting the language of the original text, so it's a good idea to click "Detect language", unless your text is very short.

{ Thanks, Zachary. }