Google app adds 20 languages to text translation service

Google's instant visual translation feature has expanded from seven to 27 languages, now that the search giant has further improved its neural machine network.

The feature is part of the Google Translate app, but integrates technology from Quest Visual, which Google acquired in May 2014. Quest Visual made the Word Lens app that delivered an auto-translate of any wording on signs photographed using a smartphone camera, without the need for internet.

Google has been serving users of the app with the seven languages that make up its main Google Translate service -- meaning you could swiftly translate road signs, menus, or any other written word to and from English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish. Those languages and their translations were perfected over time using some unlikely sources -- including official United Nations documents and EU policy, which both have to be written up using the exact same wording, in multiple nominated languages.

The latest leap in functionality, has been down to the use of neural machine networks, that can process even more vast amounts of data in a fraction of the time. This also means the real-time voice translation element of the app has been improved, which is available in 32 languages. Google Translate product lead Barak Turovsky explained in a blog post that these, vitally for emerging markets, now operate "even faster and more natural on slow networks".

Languages added to the visual translate feature include: Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Filipino, Finnish, Hungarian, Indonesian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Slovak, Swedish, Turkish and Ukrainian. Each can be translated to and from English, but not between each other. One-way translations from English to Hindi or Thai are also available. For each language, users will need to download a separate pack, with files under 2MB each.

Google Translate software engineer Otavio Good explained a bit about the tech behind this transition in a blog post, focussing on the leaps made in language processing in the advent of neural networks. 

"Five years ago, if you gave a computer an image of a cat or a dog, it had trouble telling which was which. Thanks to convolutional neural networks, not only can computers tell the difference between cats and dogs, they can even recognise different breeds of dogs." We've seen the fruits of that advancement with the weird and wonderful artistic renderings of Google's Deep Dream, most recently. But what of the practical applications to its already existing tools?

Good goes on to explain how the system is trained to recognise the difference between letters and objects and letters and non-letters, ensuring even the scruffiest of penmanship, dirt and smudges don't interfere with the translation, by training the system using these examples. The system then looks up the word it thinks it's seeing in the dictionary, but is able to account for the odd error in its recognition.

This is all pretty standard fare. Where it gets interesting is in the use of a mini neural net to allow offline real-time translations.

"[We] put severe limits on how much we tried to teach it -- in essence, put an upper bound on the density of information it handles," writes Good. "We put a lot of effort into including just the right data and nothing more. For instance, we want to be able to recognise a letter with a small amount of rotation, but not too much. If we overdo the rotation, the neural network will use too much of its information density on unimportant things. So we put effort into making tools that would give us a fast iteration time and good visualisations."

As part of its wider effort to improve Translate, the search giant also launched Translate Community, a place where people around the globe can contribute correct translations to improve the app. The forum has only been live a year, but 100 million words have already been contributed.

"We've still got lots of work to do," conceded Turovsky. "More than half of the content on the internet is in English, but only around 20 percent of the world's population speaks English. Today's updates knock down a few more language barriers, helping you communicate better and get the information you need."

All Google Translate updates will roll out on iOS and Android in the next few days.