We've seen Google Translate in action, and it always impresses: You can hold up a smartphone to someone speaking in another language, and the app will translate on the fly. Want to decipher a menu in Japanese? Just hold the phone over the words and it'll let you know that, yes, that is potentially poisonous blowfish sashimi. Or, just type in the foreign text you're trying to understand—it's like having a genius linguist with fluency in 103 languages in your pocket.
Even cooler news from Google this week: Translate's machine learning (or Neural Machine Translation) has been improved dramatically. It now translates full sentences in a more fluent, less robotic manner. Exhibit A, from Google:
The app translate for eight language pairings that account for about 35 percent of the queries submitted: to and from English and French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Turkish.
As of May, Translate was also made available offline, without Wi-Fi or data, for iOS (it was already available for Android). Many international travelers don't activate data plans when they go abroad, but Google Translate now offers downloadable packages in 52 languages for offline use. They've also compressed the packages from 250 MB to about 25 MB each, so they download quicker and take up less room on your phone. To set up Offline Mode, open the Translate app and tap the arrow next to the language you'd like to download; you can then do text translations without Wi-Fi while you're abroad.
The team behind Google Translate also announced a "Tap to Translate" feature for Android only, which means you can copy words from, say, a story you're reading and it will translate immediately (no need to switch out of the app you're using). It works for all 103 Google Translate languages. Word Lens (that mode you use to translate a street sign) now deciphers simple and traditional Chinese, too, bringing the number of Word Lens-ready languages to 29. What's Azerbaijani for "awesome"?