Play

Yes, Google Translate's camera function is quite nifty. It already allowed you to instantly visually translate printed text in seven languages – English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.

Say, you wanted to translate a street sign, ingredient list, instruction manual or signs on a music system in Spanish. All you had to do was to open the app, switch on the camera, point it at the text and, voila! Without even an internet connection, you could see text transform live on your screen into English, or any of the other six languages, depending upon your choice.

Now Google has added 20 more languages: You can now translate to and from English and Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Filipino, Finnish, Hungarian, Indonesian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Slovak, Swedish, Turkish and Ukrainian.

The app also allows you to do a one-way translations from English to Hindi and Thai.

To showcase the app's versatility, Google has released a video showing how the app translates the 1958 hit single La Bamba in real time. No engineers were harmed in the making of this video, says Google.

If you want to nitpick, though, you could always point to how machine translation misses out on nuances, or how the word "gracia" itself, for instance, could be translated as humour, skill, or funny.

But then that's what is exciting and frustrating about translation.

Perhaps we can hold off doing a little bhangra jig till Indian language capabilities get built into the app?

And if you want to see how Google Translate makes signs instantly readable, here's another video for you to watch.

Play