Google Translate gets better

Google announced three new features on Google Translate today that will make it even easier to bring the international internet to the masses.

As well as being able to cut and paste in a paragraph of text or a web page to have it translated, Google Translate now offers:

• Instant translation - as you type in one language the text is instantly converted.
• Read and write any language by having your text converted to phonetics.
• Text-to-speech - listen to the English conversion of what you've just typed.

My broadband connection is a bit dodgy some mornings so I found the 'instant translation' was quite jerky and didn't always convert what I'd written, and the text-to-speech didn't work at all; but I'm sure these are problems at my end rather than of Google's making.

Alternatively I'm still using the Translate Button I wrote about in March 2007 - select a paragraph of foreign text, click the bookmark button, and you're instantly dropped into a Google translation of the selected text.