When you’re traveling somewhere without access to the internet or don’t want to use your data plan, you can still use the Google Translate app on Android and iOS when your phone is offline. Offline translation is getting better: now, in 59 languages, offline translation is 12 percent more accurate, with improved word choice, grammar and sentence structure. In some languages like Japanese, Korean, Thai, Polish, and Hindi the quality gain is more than 20 percent.
It can be particularly hard to pronounce and spell words in languages that are written in a script you’re not familiar with. To help you in these cases, Translate offers transliteration, which gives an equivalent spelling in the alphabet you’re used to. For example, when you translate “hello” to Hindi, you will see “नमस्ते” and “namaste” in the translation card where “namaste” is the transliteration of “नमस्ते.” This is a great tool for learning how to communicate in a different language, and Translate has offline transliteration support for 10 new languages: Arabic, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu.
To try our improved offline translation and transliteration, go to your Translate app on Android or iOS. If you do not have the app, you can download it. Make sure you have the latest updates from the Play or App store. If you’ve used offline translation before, you’ll see a banner on your home screen that will take you to the right place to update your offline files. If not, go to your offline translation settings and tap the arrow next to the language name to download that language. Now you’ll be ready to translate text whether you’re online or not.
