Google Translate now supports an additional 16 ‘translate by camera’ languages

BY Stefan Constantinescu

Published 9 May 2013

Google Translate, an app that I use on a near daily basis since I live in a foreign country with a notoriously difficult language to learn, has just added 16 languages to the “translate by camera” feature. In case you haven’t heard of said feature, it does exactly what you’d expect it to do. You point your camera at some text, the Translate app scans the text, and then it spits out the results in your preferred language.

The 16 languages previously mentioned are: Bulgarian, Catalan, Danish, Estonian, Finnish, Croatian, Hungarian, Indonesian, Icelandic, Lithuanian, Latvian, Norwegian, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, and Swedish.

Considering that I regularly encounter text in Finnish and Swedish, and I visit Estonia several times a year, I’m super excited. But the features don’t stop there! Google Translate can now sync phrases across the multiple devices you own. So say you’re about to go traveling to Spain. You can input several phrases you know you’ll need into the desktop version of Translate, then open up the Translate app on your phone and they’ll all be there.