One of the coolest features of the Google Translate for Android app is that you can just point your camera at a text, tap the word you want to translate and get a translation back. Starting today, this feature supports 16 additional languages. Those are Bulgarian, Catalan, Danish, Estonian, Finnish, Croatian, Hungarian, Indonesian, Icelandic, Lithuanian, Latvian, Norwegian, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian and Swedish.
That’s in addition to Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish, which the app already supported in its first release. Google uses optical character recognition and its machine translation tools to make all of this work.
In addition, Google is making its recently introduced phrasebook feature available in that app. The phrasebook, Google said at the time, allows “you to save the most useful phrases to you, for easy reference later on, exactly when you need them,” and revisiting them regularly should help you turn these translations “into lasting knowledge.”
The phrasebook is now available in Translate’s app menu, where it replaces the app’s ‘favorite’ feature. The service will automatically sync with your Google Account (assuming you are signed in), so any changes you make on your phone will also be reflected on the Google Translate desktop site.
“With your favorite phrases synced across devices,” Google writes, “we hope you’ll never be at a loss for words again.”
It’s worth noting that the iOS version of the app does not currently support translate by camera.