Perhaps the most exciting aspect of this Google Translate tool was the instantaneous, largely accurate English translation of text from a foreign language. I dug a bit deeper to understand how this technology operates and this is what I found. While researching the ‘word lens,’ I found that the Japanese to English translation was just made available, and the Spanish to English translation had been around for some time already. Then, my piqued curiosity lead me to further explore how the app works. We were all dumbfounded and began to come up with theories for how this could possibly work so quickly and so well.Īfter tossing around a couple of outlandish guesses, someone blurted out the word ‘algorithm.’ Yes, the ubiquitous buzz word I can’t seem to escape. I watched as the words appeared right before my eyes in freakishly accurate English. As a group of us sat down at a local eatery and began to browse the menu written in Spanish, a friend pulled out her phone and hovered over the words with the Google Translate live camera. I just returned from a trip down to Mexico for my best friend’s wedding where, despite many shocking sights and sounds, the most astonishing thing I experienced was the Google Translate word lens in action.

Translate from korean to english google