Google Translate

CNET Editors' review

by: Jaymar Cabebe on June 01, 2012

Google Translate for Android is a simple, versatile tool that supports more than 60 languages, offers an SMS translator, and even speaks some of your translations aloud.

The best thing about Google Translate is its simplicity. The app is decked out with a sleek, ICS-flavored Holo theme, complete with Android 4.0's signature action bar and drop-down menu. Altogether, the new skin is a marked improvement over the slightly clunkier interface developed for Android Gingerbread.

To use Google Translate, just select your input and output languages, then type in your text. For even faster results, you can set the app to automatically detect your input language, and you can quickly interchange your input and output languages, by hitting the arrow icon between the fields. From there, the app returns a written translation and in some cases an audio translation. It even gives you a share button, in case you want to send your translation to a friend.

It's no secret that Google Translate performs a solid job translating, but what really makes it shine are the extra conveniences it offers. It automatically keeps a history of your translations, and lets you star any of them for easy access later, from the Favorites screen. Text-to-speech output is available for select languages, and can be a huge help when you're dealing with unfamiliar phonetics. Also helpful is the speech translation feature, which can sometimes translate spoken language through your device's microphone. However, with voice recognition technology still relatively young, this feature is nowhere near perfect. Finally, the SMS translation feature can pull in any of your text messages for a quick processing.

One thing the app is missing, is offline support. Sure, caching entire libraries of languages locally would probably be overkill, but it would be nice to be able to save one or a few basic libraries, perhaps on your SD card. Still, Google Translate is easy to use, and can translate over 60 languages, which makes it tough to beat.