A new look for Google Translate

Today, we've launched three new features as well as a new look and feel for Google Translate — a service that helps people access information throughout the world by enabling them to automatically translate text and and web pages into their own language. Google Translate offers 51 languages, representing over 98% of Internet users today.

Along with our shiny new layout, these new features should make it faster and easier for you to translate text between our 2550 language pairs:

• Translate instantly: Say goodbye to the old "Translate" button. Google Translate now translates your text right as you type.

• Read and write any language: Want to say "Today is a good day" in Chinese, but can't read Han characters? Click "Show romanization" to read the text written phonetically in English. Right now, this works for all non-Roman languages except for Hebrew, Arabic and Persian.

We also have a new input transliteration feature for Arabic, Persian or Hindi. If you want to translate from one of these languages, but can't type the script on your keyboard, our input transliteration feature will allow you to type words as they sound and convert them to native script.

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• Text-to-speech: When translating into English, you can now also hear translations in spoken form by clicking the Speaker Icon.

Watch Josh, an engineer on our team, give a quick demo of the new Google Translate:



We hope these improvements will make reading, learning and communicating in foreign languages easier and more fun. As we continue to improve the precision of our automatic translation system, we're also always looking for ways to evolve and improve our interface. Let us know if you have any feedback on these changes in our discussion group.

Posted by Awaneesh Verma, Product Manager