Google Translate 4+

It's getting super good

The translation UI is getting much better. New translation OCR is now showing its strength. And they've re-added pinch zoom to get good translations at a distance. Super valuable at the museums in Japan!

Only one start off for lousy handling of partial or poor internet connection. I have the data downloaded for Japanese, but sometimes I just have to go full Airplane mode to get it to switch over to offline mode. Would give a solid 5-start rating if the engineering can get this figured out. Would be way better to use offline within about 5sec of not getting a result from online resources.

An mportant option is gone

I used Google Translate for playing japanese games. I took a picture, selected the text, and I could see how the kanji is read, on top of the translation. It was an important study tool. Now the translation appears on top of the photo automatically without me being able to turn it off. I see the translation, but I can’t see how the kanji is read.
It has an option to select the translated text and send to GT initial page, but the japanese text sent is not the original text, but an adaptation of the original that GT re-translated from English. And almost always, the word I wanted to see the reading, is changed for a synonym.
Funny how a simple option can ruin what was the best translation tool previously.

It’s great … *BUT*

This works great for translating between languages in the same or in similar languages families. I would give it 4 stars because it is useful for quick phrases when taking to people in Europe and the Americas.

However in my experiences, the translations between Japanese and English have just gotten worse and worse. I find it absolutely infuriating that Google translate (when translating Eng>>Jpn ) just gives me the English word in katakana.

And this is a preferential problem, but I’m not a big fan of the new way of selecting text from the camera. It’s the ice level of text selections and it better not be vertical text because google translate will only select multiple lines left to right and translate the text top to bottom, left to right. CJK language go top to bottom, right to left. If there is a fix to this problem with the settings, it would be even worse because that would mean the thing isn’t default and it’s a show of how unintuitive the UI is.

This was just mostly a rant on my user experience with Jpn&Eng. it’s amazing otherwise.

Developer Response ,

Hi there. We'd like our users to have the best possible experience with the Google Translate app. We'll share your feedback with our product team. Thanks.