The new languages are: Bosnian, Cebuano, Hmong, Javanese and Marathi. All of them except for Bosnian are considered to be in alpha status, so they still have a lot of work to do, but the company says it will continue to test and improve them in time.

“If you took a quick snapshot of content available on the web, you might think that everyone around the world spoke English, Chinese, French or Spanish,” says Google Translate program manager Sveta Kelman. “But in fact, millions of people around the world speak an incredible array of languages that currently have a small presence across the web.”

“Google Translate helps bridge the divide between the content available online and people’s ability to access that information,” says Kelman.

According to Google, the five new languages are spoken by a combined 183 million people.

You can access the new languages at translate.google.com or via the Android or iOS apps.

If you open the app, and select “offline languages” from the menu, you will be able to choose a package for download. You should probably do this while you do have a connection, so you have it ready.

“To enable offline translation between any two languages, you just need to select them in the offline languages menu,” says associate product manager Minqi Jiang. “Once the packages are downloaded, you’re good to go.”

“While the offline models are less comprehensive than their online equivalents, they are perfect for translating in a pinch when you are traveling abroad with poor reception or without mobile data access,” adds Jiang.

The packages are only available for Android 2.3 and up. 50 languages are supported.

To use it, simply click the star under the translated text in Google Translate, and it will save it to the Phrasebook feature. There is a new Phrasebook icon in the upper right-hand corner, where you can view the stuff you save.

In addition to helping you retain knowledge, the feature should make it quicker and easier to get translations you might need more frequently.

“With Google Translate, you can find the right thing to say, but you may not remember the translation at the right time,” says Google in a blog post. “You might find yourself performing the same translation again and again, until you finally commit the translation to memory.”

“Phrasebook for Google Translate jumpstarts this slow learning process by allowing you to save the most useful phrases to you, for easy reference later on, exactly when you need them,” the company adds. “By revisiting the useful phrases in your Phrasebook from time to time, you can turn any brief translation into lasting knowledge.”

Phrasebook includes controls to let you filter phrases by language pair, and lets you search for specific phrases within the feature. When you hover over the phrases, you find a clickable text-to-speech icon, so you can hear a phrase pronounced.

Etsy also says there has been a steady increase in shipments to Spain and Latin America, suggesting that a significant amount of Etsy customers are also coming from Spanish-speaking countries.

The company announced back in October that it was working on translation into more languages, and there was “high interest” from the community for a Spanish language version of the site.

“Releasing Etsy in such a widespread language as Spanish is not just a win for our members who prefer to express themselves in the language of Cervantes,” says Juan Pablo, who joined Etsy after working on the international effort by Craigslist (and Yahoo Search before that). “Etsy is a distinctly global marketplace, and these changes benefit us all: no matter where we are, what language we speak, or which currency we use, our buyers will now be able to access more one-of-a-kind goods in Spanish-speaking countries, and our sellers will see an influx in a vibrant community of Spanish-speaking buyers.”

“Opening Etsy to a new market is not a trivial task,” adds Pablo. “And while I am joining the efforts on the engineering front, the first step along the way was to translate our site. We have taken the most Etsy approach we know: reaching out to our community of members to translate, adapt and help us understand the needs of their regions.”

Etsy has a page dedicated to the Etsy habla Español team, which has been dedicated to “teaching Etsy Spanish”.

Other languages that Etsy is available in so far, include: English, Dutch, French, German and British English. More are sure to come.

“Our users often tell us that they check our translations by translating them back into their original language,” says Google in a blog post. “Reverse translations can distinguish translations of different meanings and reveal subtle differences among similar words. Each translation is now annotated with its most frequent reverse translations.”

“The French novelist Gustave Flaubert was known to spend hours on end in pursuit of le mot juste—the perfect word,” Google adds. “At Google, we prefer to deliver results in an instant, ranked in order of relevance. Frequency indicators now mark each translation as common, uncommon, or rare, based on the vast number of translations we use to train our system. The rarest translations are hidden by default, but appear easily with a click. Your search for the perfect translation should now be more efficient than ever.”

Google has been doing a lot of work with synonyms lately, particularly in search. Now, we’re seeing some improvements in Google Translate as well. Results will now group synonymous translations together. The feature is only available when translating to English at this point, but Google says it intends to support more languages soon.

“You’ll first need a caption track for your video, so if you don’t yet have one you can learn how to make one here,” the company explains in a blog post. “Select ‘Request translation’ in the YouTube Video Manager, choose the languages you’d like to translate into, and click “Next.” We’ll create caption translation documents that you can now invite anyone to help translate, or you can translate yourself. To translate the captions yourself, select the language, and it’ll open up the caption translation document in the Google Translator Toolkit editor to help your translate faster.”

“To give you context on the captions, we’ve also embedded the YouTube video in the editor so you can watch as you translate,” the company notes. “For several languages we’ll provide first draft of the translation using Google’s machine translation technology. We’ll also provide preview of what the translated caption looks like on the video so you can make sure the translated captions fit.”

After all of that, just click “Publish to YouTube”.

If you need more instruction, YouTube has a help center article on the topic.

Lao, sometimes called Laotion, is spoken in Laos, Thailand, the U.S., France, Canada, China, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina. In Laos, it is the official language. As of 2006, there were a reported 5.22 million native speakers.

Google is keeping the “alpha” tag on Lao for the time being, as it’s not quite where the company wants it to be. Google Translate Associate Product Manager Minqi Jiang says in a post on the Google Translate blog:

The Google Translate team is constantly working to improve automatic translations, both for languages that have been available for some time, and for currently unavailable languages whose translation quality have yet to meet our launch standards. This work includes collecting new data from which our system can learn and grow smarter; changing the algorithms behind Google Translate; and improving the grammaticality of translations. There are many languages we work on that are not there yet but that we hope to launch in the future.

Support for Lao meets our launch standards, but translation quality is at the lower end compared to that of other languages we offer. We therefore designate Lao with an “alpha” status until we can make further improvements. While our Lao translations will be usable in some situations, like providing an English reader with the gist of an article written in Lao, they will fail in other situations where more precise translations are needed. We need your feedback in order to improve the quality of Lao translations.

Google is calling upon users to help improve its translation of the language by providing alternate translations (by clicking on words or phrases of the translated sentence) or using the Google Translator Toolkit to upload translations.

Last month, Google added some new camera functionality to Google Translate for Android, making the service all the more helpful in travel situations. Now, you can take a picture of a sign that is written in an unfamiliar language, and get it translated.

This should make a nice addition to the translation-by-handwriting feature Google introduced for Android earlier this year (an extension of this technology just made its way to Google’s mobile search just a couple weeks ago).

New reviews hitting the Google Play store are overwhelmingly praising the camera update.

New features include:

• Use camera to take a picture and brush text to translate (available on Android 2.3 and above).
• Get instant translation results as you type.
• Choose dialect preference for speech input.
• Japanese handwriting now recognizes multiple characters at once.
• Added access network state permission to check network availability when sending requests.

The app allows users to translate text between over 64 languages. Supported languages include: Afrikaans, Albanian, Arabic, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Basque, Belarusian, Bengali, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, Georgian, German, Greek, Gujarati, Haitian Creole, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Korean, Latin, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Maltese, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese, Welsh, and Yiddish.

From the Twitter translation center blog:

Last May, we opened our Translation Center to 6 new languages using a new set of features we’ve created to make the translation process faster. There is more automation and more efficiency in this new system that allows for faster input from the translator community.

We’d like to thank you, our dedicated translators, who made this launch happen by requesting and supporting Twitter in your language. You are the ones who help us get closer to making Twitter available around the world.

Back in May, Twitter added Basque, Czech, Greek, Ukrainian, Catalan, and Afrikaans to the Translation center, where volunteers immediately got to work translating the site (site frame, not the tweets). The first two of those languages to launch from the Center were Ukrainian and Catalan, which became available in early July. Not, with the launch of these three new languages, all we are waiting on in Afrikaans from that class.

Follow @international

Twitter Int’l
@international

Twitter is now available in 3 new Beta languages: Basque, Czech and Greek. Congratulations translators! http://t.co/TDlWp2SW

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21 minutes ago via web · powered by @socialditto

Before this, Twitter became available in right-to-left languages Arabic, Hebrew, Farsi, and Urdu.

The addition of Greek, Czech, and Basque means that Twitter is officially available in 33 different languages.

[Image via Harald Groven, Flickr]

In all, Twitter (the service, not the actual tweets) has been translated and is ready for use in 30 different languages.

Twitter launched the Translation Center back in February, 2011, with the goal of crowdsourcing the site’s translation, so that it could be accessible to more countries across the world. When the center launched, Twitter was only available in English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish. The launch brought three new languages to the translation block – Indonesian, Russian, and Turkish.

We worked to ensure the quality, consistency and unified voice of our translators were in our tools – via automation. Today, we are making two of those languages available for all users to see and change their language settings to – Catalan and Ukrainian. The translations you see live on Twitter.com are based on translation completion and community approval. In order to use Twitter in Catalan or Ukrainian, please go to your language settings today.

Back in May, Twitter added six new languages the Translation Center – Catalan, Afrikaans, Ukrainian, Greek, Czech and Basque. In under two months, two of those languages are now ready for prime time. Twitter reminds users that the more people volunteer to participate in the translation of the other four, the quicker they will become available to all users.

The last four languages that became available on Twitter were right-to-left languages including Arabic, Hebrew, Farsi, and Urdu.

Follow @yuribcn

YuriBCN aka JordiVK
@yuribcn

I can now use @Twitter in my own language: Catalan. Thank you! #twitterencatala

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7 hours ago via web · powered by @socialditto

[Image Courtesy Liz Castro, Flickr]