Google Translate now lets users turn Chinese characters into English at the pointing of a cameraphone

GOOGLE has showcased its newest translation technology which allows users to transform Chinese characters into English at the pointing of a cameraphone.

GOOGLE has recruited artificial intelligence to translate languages faster but admits instant, conversational translations are still a long way off.

The company showcased its newest translation technology at the Googleplex in Mountain View, California, today in the lead up to its annual developers’ conference, adding visual Chinese translations and ways to translate text messages in moments.

Google Translate engineer and Word Lens creator Otavio Good said the company introduced “machine learning” to speed up translations, and users could now transform Chinese characters into English simply by pointing a phone camera at them.

“The thing that made this possible is state-of-the-art machine-learning algorithms,” he said.

“It’s something called a convolutional neural network and it’s really good at recognising images. Google has had a big push lately on machine learning.”

Google’s Translate can now decipher both traditional and simplified Chinese, Mr Good said, and can transform words on a road sign, for example, to make them appear in English rather than Chinese when you look at them through a phone’s camera.

Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California.

The app can translate an additional 28 languages this way, and 103 languages in text alone.

But while the technology is speeding up the translation process, Mr Good said Google’s app was not yet ready to translate languages seamlessly on the fly, allowing two people to hold a normal conversation in different languages.

“It’s still a long way off until we get to as good as a human (at translating languages),” he said. “The machine-learning algorithms are going to push things forward.

“As far as real-time voice aspect of it, we do have a conversation mode … but it might have some trouble with that.”

Google also recently introduced a “Tap to translate” feature that lets users translate any language by copying it and selecting a translation icon that would pop up inside any Google Android app — a feature Mr Good said was designed to quickly translate text messages and instant message conversations.

Google also reduced the size of its offline language translation downloads from as much as 300MB to just 30MB.

The internet giant’s annual developers’ conference, Google I/O, begins tomorrow, with announcements expected to include virtual reality technology, new Android software, and a new tablet computer.

Jennifer Dudley-Nicholson travelled to Mountain View as a guest of Google.