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March 15, 2013

Google Translate Adds Personalized Phrasebook Feature

By Rory Lidstone
TMCnet Contributing Writer

Google (News - Alert) works hard to improve on its services, usually in the form of cool new features. But while flashier, mobile-centric services such as Google Now tend to grab up most of the attention, services like Google Translate are also receiving continuous updates and tweaks.

Google recently introduced the ability to create a personalized phrasebook in Google Translate, making it easy to find phrases or sentences you want to memorize or find yourself frequently translating. The company really put the focus on using phrasebooks to aid in memorizing important phrases, though, stating that by revisiting those phrases repeatedly, you can properly commit them to memory — which is correct.

The phrasebook function is now enabled by default, and is accessible by way of the book icon in the top right corner of the Google Translate page. To save a phrase, however, users must press the newly added star icon, placed beneath the translations themselves.

Using the phrasebook is quite simple, as it displays the phrase in its original language on the left and the translation on the right. Furthermore, it allows for filtering by language pairs and features text-to-speech capabilities, as with the rest of Google Translate.

In order to improve its products and services as a whole, Google often has to take away rather than add, as was the case this week when it announced the retirement of eight services. The most significant retiree of the bunch was definitely Google Reader, which still has a rather devoted following, despite an overall decline in use.

Google Reader becomes officially defunct as of July 1, though, giving its users a bit of time to find an alternative Web feed aggregator. Other products to be removed include the Google Voice app for BlackBerry (News - Alert), Google Cloud Connect and Snapseed Desktop.

In addition, MPEG LA recently decided to license patents to Google essential for the search giant's VP8 video compression format.

Edited by Braden Becker