Google Translate Adds 20 New Languages, Boogies With ‘La Bamba’ Mashup

Earlier this year, the Google Translate got a whole lot more useful thanks to the ability to read signs in a foreign language in real-time. For those that travel abroad on a regular basis and don’t speak or understand the native language, this tool has been a huge asset.

While the instant translation feature was definitely welcome to users, it was limited in its first iteration; it only supported English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. Today, Google is adding support for a whole truckload of additional languages supported by the instant visual translation feature in Google Translate.

You can now translate to and from English and Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Filipino, Finnish, Hungarian, Indonesian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Slovak, Swedish, Turkish and Ukrainian. You can also do one-way translations from English to Hindi and Thai.

As before, you get an even larger pool of languages to select from if you skip the instant translations and instead simply snap a picture of the text that you wish to translate. In that case, a total of 37 languages are supported.

To celebrate the language expansion, Google Translate Product Lead Barak Turovsky posted the following video which shows the app going up against the song “La Bamba.”

In addition to the language update, Google has also made some app tweaks to provide a more pleasant experience for users on slower mobile connections when using Google Translate. So even if you have a slow or unreliable network connection, the voice conversation mode has seen improvements when performing real-time translations via 32 supported languages.