Google Translate Ratings and Reviews

Accessibility for Instructional Design

Google Translate is now a form of augmented reality and is adapted for educational purposes. This application provides users with tools to translate between languages and they now include an image option; users take a photograph of a sign, piece of paper, or other form of written text and receive a translation in the language of their choice. This augmented reality is ground breaking because this allows online learners to access content in other languages. The application also translates spoken word in real time, which allows all learners to access audio in written form, in their own language, online or in-person.
This version of augmented reality that is adapted for education can be utilized in an online learning environment and can be utilized by instructional designers. One of the major challenges with instructional design is selecting the correct tools to build learning experiences. With this application, instructional designers are able to create a course in their own language and can make their lesson accessible to learners by recommending Google Translate for accessibility. I plan to utilize this in conjunction with my online lessons and videos in order to reach more students with diverse abilities and primary languages.

Pages of Translation Lightening Fast, and Reliable!

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!).

Horrible Application Given the Size of the Company

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.

This used to be excellent. Google lens made it terrible!

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.

Great app ruined by update

This was an incredibly useful app that I used for reading Japanese characters that I was not familiar with. It would provide the reading in Japanese along with the translation into English or another language.
The update changed the ocr function and now it uses google lens which is terrible in this case. The text is automatically translated into English and I have to change the setting every time I use it to “show original language” just to be able to find the character I am trying to read. Please add the option to disable the automatic translation function for the camera.
Also the word selection is buggy. I used to be able to highlight exactly what I wanted to translate. Now it tries to auto-select words and frequently selects parts of text I don’t need or won’t select the text I want. Please switch back to manually highlight method or make it an option.
Finally, please bring back the reading/pronunciation of the original word (the reading of the Japanese character in this case).
This app was a 6 stars out of 5 before. After this update to google lens it’s just 2 since the functionality I relied on is gone now. I give it 2 stars because it is still useful for translating European languages.

The new update ruined a great tool to help learn Chinese

So, I’ve been learning Chinese for a few years now, and one of the most useful features has been the camera mode in Google Translate. When you learn a new character in Chinese, if you don’t know the pronunciation, it can be difficult to search up. Google Translate for full sentences in Chinese has always been iffy, so I usually found it most helpful to select “Camera” mode (instead of instant translation), SELECT THE COUPLE CHARACTERS I DIDN’T KNOW, and get the pinyin and English translation.

But the update got rid of the ability to take the picture before translating, which makes it more difficult to find the characters I’m trying to learn. On top of that, when I click on the translation to learn the pinyin of the words (since the pronunciation doesn’t show in the preview) - it will TRANSLATE THE ENGLISH BACK INTO CHINESE TO GIVE YOU A DIFFERENT CHARACTER WITH THE “SAME” MEANING. The pinyin is very important so I can type the character and not have to rely on using a picture to translate in the future, but Googles update makes this impossible since you don’t get the original characters pinyin unless the “translation” back to Chinese gives you the same characters. Overall, a super infuriating update that ruined this app.

Now 5 Stars But Still Recommed Deepl

This is 1 of only 2 translator apps I will give 5 stars. It has gotten much better over time to the point that I can reasonable rely on it to doble check things. If you need real time transcription, Google Translate is the best. For anything else though including accuracy, definitely use Deepl. Google Translate has come a long way at figuring out Idioms, sayings, the right usage when something is ambiguous, etc. However, Deepl still gets things right more often, especially with the paid version when it can deep dive into things like verification of tone and level of formality for audience where what you have on paper may be 100% correct but may the verb usage is informal but a student is talking to a teacher. This is area Google Translate comes up short. Overall though, 5 stars and definitely far better than any of those other translator apps out there except Deepl.

Ruined image translation

They've replaced the google instant image translate with lens which is absolutely one of the worse things to ever exist in this apps history. It's difficult to translate text on an image because they separate each new line of text, on the image, with a new line for that text; it doesn't form complete sentences. For example- translating languages with different grammar will be incorrect due to it not putting the sentences together. Maybe if they add a "draw" feature like before, and didn't give you new lines of each new translated sentences, it would be better than the old one. But for now it's one of the most frustrating things; to have to form the sentences manually, and selecting the initial text is also a nightmare because you have to exit the lens and back into the returned text to copy the original text, if that's what you're looking for like me. Me and a bunch of other people are not happy with this new feature, would you enable us to use the old feature, or at least go through the effort to implement those old features into lens? I'm willing to wait as long as it takes for us to get those old features back.

French Shortcomings

Recent changes where we can no longer coax the system to force the informal ‘tu’ or the formal ‘vous’ - we used to be able to put tu/vous directly into the English version in place of “you” to force the translation…now it completely ignores this and just randomly gives us tu or vous forms as it sees fit - which has nothing to do with our desired translation.

Also with the part tense we used to be able to add “it rained” to translate to the passé composé and then “it was raining” to translate to the imperfect. But now it also ignores our input and decides on its own. This defeats the purpose of its not translating what I’m telling it I want.

Huge ongoing glitch! They don’t specify the gender on French nouns that begin with vowels. Most words you can see le for masculine or la for feminine. But for nouns the begin with vowels it’s contracted to l’ so we can’t tell the gender. I’ve send several pieces of feedback to correct this glitch by using the indefinite article un or une instead, which is never contracted or just by identifying the noun as masc or fem. It’s been years of me among suggestions and Google refuses to fix this design flaw.

Developer Response ,

Hi there. We're sorry to hear about your experience. Could you please describe the issue you're experiencing in the Google Translate Help Community so we can investigate further: https://goo.gle/2tkDc6j? Thanks.

Google Translate needs a massive overhaul!

FEATURE REQUEST: Since most people are translating from a foreign language to their native language, it would be lovely if you could make your chosen language “stick” at the top of the list. I would prefer to have the languages I use most frequently stick to the top of the list. For me, they are: English, French, German, Latin, Russian, and Spanish. That would solve the annoyance of having to reselect one or more my core languages every time I deviate from my norm. I would like to include Croatian in my core list, but the machine voice for Croatian is unintelligible, even to native speakers because the sound quality is so poor and it speaks far too fast.

HEBREW & YIDDISH: It is not possible to learn to speak or translate from either of these languages. Google has NO VOICE, machine or natural, for EITHER of them, nor does it scribe the translation using our common alphabet, Latin. At least then, I could make an attempt at the pronunciation of the words.

I would cheerfully give Google Translate 5 stars as soon as these deficits are dealt with.