Google Translate triples the languages it understands

Do you speak a foreign language? If not then Google Translate becomes your friend while travelling and today it's getting a bit better. Actually a lot better, going from seven languages to 27, which triples the amount it could handle -- okay that math is slightly off, but it's close enough.

Google announces the update to the app, which can be pointed at a foreign language and read the words in your native tongue. That's pretty essential for traveling. While it's good to know the language in any nation you're visiting, it's not always possible.

In fact, there was talk of doing just a bit more. According to Google "We started out with seven languages—English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish—and today we're adding 20 more. 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. You can also do one-way translations from English to Hindi and Thai. (Or, try snapping a pic of the text you’d like translated -- we have a total of 37 languages in camera mode.)"

Google also is promising a better experience even if your network is slow, a feature for emerging markets where connectivity is not always up to par.

The company has put together a community of translators to pull this off. You can download the app from Google Play or the App Store.