Google announced this week that it has improved the offline translation capabilities of its Translate mobile app on both Android and iOS.

“When you’re traveling somewhere without access to the internet or don’t want to use your data plan, you can still use the Google Translate app on Android and iOS when your phone is offline,” Google’s Sami Iqram writes. “Offline translation is getting better.”

Now available in 59 languages, Google Translate’s offline translation is 12 percent more accurate than before, with improved word choice, grammar, and sentence structure. In some languages like Japanese, Korean, Thai, Polish, and Hindi, the quality gain is more than 20 percent, Google says.

Translate also offers transliteration capabilities, which gives an equivalent spelling in the alphabet you’re used to. For example, when you translate “hello” to Hindi, you will see the literal translation and “namaste” in the translation card; “namaste” is the transliteration of the original word. Translate supports offline transliteration for new languages like Arabic, Bengali, Gujrati, Kannada, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu now.

Tagged with Google Translate