The Google Mobile blog has declared the latest update to Google Translate for iPhone. The Google app has added a total of five new Indian languages to its kitty namely, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Tamil and Telugu.
The Translate app for the iPhone is now capable of supporting 63 languages, including the five new ones. Earlier in June this year, Google had released these five Indian languages for the desktop and mobile web apps on an experimental basis. The move was executed keeping in mind the huge population of over 500 million people in India and Bangladesh alone who speak these languages.
The refreshed app displays dictionary results for single words of these languages to users. It also provides them with the romanizations for these new Indic tongues. This should be beneficial to those who can’t understand the language, but would like to learn it. According to Google, Indic languages like the five new additions are quite different from English in the manner of speaking, pronouncing and writing, which created challenges for them while incorporating support for the aforesaid.
However, the blog states that as these are still experimental alpha languages, users would have to bear with reduced fluency and more untranslated words compared to some of the other better known languages like Spanish or Chinese. Besides the 63 languages, the application also supports voice input in 17 and text-to-speech in 24 languages.
The updated Google Translate app for iPhone is now available for free in supported countries at the App Store.