Google Translate Offline Mode Just Got Much Better
Google Translate is the app that has been critical to my success when traveling to other countries. When you don’t speak the language (or speak the language poorly) in the places you travel, you have the ability to quickly find something or talk on the phone to create a translation you can use to talk to this guy on the street can be a lifesaver.
Google offers the ability to download languages for offline use for some time. The idea is that data roaming is often expensive, and you can use all of these language features when you’re not connected to Wi-Fi, without big bills.
However, if you’ve ever used offline mode for a language, you’ve probably noticed that the results aren’t as good as when connected to the internet. The problem is that when you are connected to the Internet, Google uses Neural Machine Translation (NMT) to improve the accuracy of the translation. It wasn’t there when you are offline, but as of this week, this feature is also available for 59 offline languages.
At a basic level, the difference is that the NMT translates the entire sentence rather than treating it as separate words. This means that it can take into account the context of the sentence and provide a significantly more relevant translation that looks more like a speaking person than a translation performed by a bot. Sentences translated with NMT are easier to read and in turn make more sense.
Here’s a rundown of the same sentence that was previously translated using Google’s Phrase Based Machine Translation (PBMT) and what it can do now.
If you’ve used Google Translate before offline, you should log into the app now and download the newer versions of the languages you are using. If you’ve never used offline languages, you can download the languages you want (they are all pretty small so you don’t have to worry about your phone running out of memory) by launching the app and then going to Settings, then Offline Translation and download the languages you want (you can also update the languages you already downloaded here).