The Word Lens feature of the Google Translate app now supports Japanese, allowing users to hover the camera of their mobile device over Japanese text and receive an English translation in return on their screens.

With the addition of Japanese support to Word Lens, Google Translate becomes an even more helpful tool for people who are planning to visit the Asian country.

Japanese Support In Google Translate's Word Lens

Google Translate already had the capability of translating Japanese characters into English text from captured photos, but with the latest update to the app, users can skip the step of taking pictures.

According to the post on the official Google blog post that announced the update, users will be able to simply point their camera at things such as signs and menus with Japanese text that they might encounter. The Google Translate app will automatically display a translation to English on the device's screen. The feature works both ways too, as it is capable of transforming English text into Japanese characters, which will be very helpful when communicating with locals who do not have a firm grasp on the English language.

With millions upon millions of tourists visiting Japan per year, the Word Lens feature of Google Translate has significantly increased in usefulness for trips to the Asian country. One of the major advantages of the app is that it does not require an internet connection to function, allowing tourists to use their mobile devices as a translation tool without worrying about having to be online and any associated data roaming costs.

However, it should be noted that the Word Lens feature works best when it is only making simple translations, such as what is written on a street sign or what a store's name is. For more complex translation, Google recommends users to utilize the previous method of first taking a picture of what needs to be translated and running it through the Google Translate app.

Google Translate Continues To Develop Word Lens

Word Lens was originally a standalone app by Quest Visual, but Google acquired the developer and its technology in 2014. Word Lens was expected to provide even more functionality to Google Translate, but at the time of the acquisition, the feature only supported a limited number of languages, namely English, Spanish, Russian, Italian, French, Portuguese, and German.

Google continued developing Word Lens within Google Translate, with the feature even making an appearance in a June 2015 advertisement that shows how the app is capable of breaking down the language barriers between nationalities and cultures to bring people together.

With the addition of Japanese support, Word Lens is now capable of translating in 30 languages. The wider Google Translate app, meanwhile, already support 103 languages through typing input, with offline translation support for 52 languages.

The Word Lens is not the only feature that the Google Translate team is working on, though. The latest news on the app's development are so-called zero-shot translations, which allows the software to make translations without prior learning. According to artificial intelligence researchers, the progress reveals that Google Translate has invented its own set of rules in translating languages.