Google Translate 4+

If if you are using anything but Google translate to do your Spanish work for you, you are missing the boat. It translates whole pages of text instantly without error. It uses understandable language for our US - Mexico border area. I was using a different translator when I saw a doctor using Google to communicate with a Spanish only patient. That’s when I learned about Google Translate and switched.

For the past two years, I have used a different Spanish translator/dictionary App. It was slow and tedious, only would translate a short paragraph at a time, but worse - it inserted words which were clearly wrong. One time instead of asking my gardener to complete a task, it inserted the word marriage into the sentence! His wife would have not been happy! Luckily I caught it before texting as I had to double- check every phrase.
But now I no longer have to worry and each phrase is spot on. ( at least so far I think it’s been!).

The Google translate app is a joke. There are very few apps that can lead someone to yell expletives while sitting in their kitchen trying to enjoy a cup of tea. Editing something you’ve written on the Google Translate App is a pitiful process filled with tapping the screen of your phone over and over attempting to unselect individual words or sentences. Sometimes it selects the entirety of what you’ve written and won’t allow you to unselect it without a fight. It’s unconscionable that the process for editing what you’ve written doesn’t follow every other smart phone format. Not only that, when you’ve finished writing of considerable length, in my case an email, and would like to highlight, copy and paste it, you will quickly realize you cannot highlight and scroll at the same time like you can on any other apple app that includes type. Instead, you’re forced to go through a ridiculous process of highlighting as much as you can see, pasting it, returning to the app, copying more and then pasting that. I repeated that process six time before I had copied my email over to gmail. If I had more time I would go into detail about the “define” tool that pops up unprovoked and further adds to the absolute farce that is the UX of this application. For a company like Google to have produced such a dysfunctional infuriating UI is truly shameful.

As usual an update makes the produce worse instead of better. I live in a foreign country because of my husbands job. I use this app everyday. ALL THE TIME! Before, I could use the camera option to translate in real time or take a picture and let it scan for text. Then I could choose which text to translate, it could be 1 word or 1 sentence or 1 paragraph or the whole thing. The lastest update removed this option. Now when I click on the camera option it says “Google lens” it automatically blocks out the original texts and puts the translation over it, like it did previously but now when I take the picture I can not scan the text and choose what part to translate. It simply takes a screen shot of the translation already made on the first screen. If I try to select a specific word, it selects the translation and then translates it back into the original language. This does work well! The meaning gets more and more mixed up until it just makes no sense at all. Translating a translation instead of just scanning the original text is a huge downgrade. I am so frustrated! I am going to start looking for other translators because this has caused a lot of issues for me, on a daily basis. I’ll keep checking back to see if they ever fix this issue or not.