Microsoft Translator gets image translating

Right now, Google’s Translate app is a pretty standard resource for those staring down the barrel of a street sign in a foreign country, but Microsoft is making a solid push to compete. Previously their app required you to type in text or speak a phrase aloud, but that’s not much use if you don’t know how to pronounce the words and your keyboard doesn’t have the right characters. Fortunately Microsoft Translator has just received image translation capabilities.

The effect looks pretty slick. The live display shows the words superimposed over their foreign language counterparts in real time. It doesn’t quite have the augmented reality “wow” factor of Google Translate’s image translation, which attempts to actually replace the text you’re looking at by trying to match the font and color (if you haven’t played around with that, by the way, do so immediately because it’s like magic), but this is Microsoft’s first showing of the feature, so we can expect it to adapt and improve from here.

Image translation has been available on the iOS version of the app for a couple of months now, but this week sees Android support rolling out for the following languages: Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Poruguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish. This update also includes the inline translation feature which lets you translate sentences on the fly from email or text messages and the addition of 34 new languages to the available downloadable packs. This means Microsoft Translator now supports 43 languages total.

Click the button below to start giving this app a spin. Let us know what you think of this feature in the comments and whether or not it stands up to Google Translate. As always, stay tuned to Android Authority for all the coolest new features coming to the apps that you love.