eWEEK content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.
Google Maps is available with automatic Hindi translations, as the company continues to tailor and customize its products to make them even more useful to people in other languages.
The new Hindi Google Maps translations were announced in a July 22 post on the Google India Blog by the Maps team.
The Hindi translations were launched to “provide more useful and comprehensive maps for Hindi-speakers in India,” the post states. “This means that if you’re looking for a historical monument such as the Hawa Mahal in Jaipur, or the famous Lodhi Gardens in Delhi, you’ll be able to see the place’s name in both Hindi and English.”
Users can see the Hindi maps on desktop machines or on Google Maps for Android on devices running Android versions 4.3 and above. Computer users must enable Hindi as their preferred language in their Google account settings to use the Hindi labels in Google Maps, according to the post. Android users can select the Hindi option within the “Language and input” menu found in their phone’s Settings menu.
“Once you opt in to Hindi as your preferred language, you will be able to see Hindi name labels directly on the map for cities, localities, important roads and other popular points of interest such as public parks and schools,” the post continues. “The labels that are visible on Google Maps today were created by transliterating English names to Hindi, and ensuring the text resonates with local dialects. Yet, as any native speaker knows, each language has its own nuances, so if you can think of better or more accurate Hindi place names, we encourage you to send corrections our way using the “Report a problem” link visible on the bottom right-hand side of Google Maps or via Google Map Maker.”
Google often adds language translation services for many of its user services.
Earlier this month, Google added Gmail translation support for an additional 13 languages, bringing the total number of languages available using Gmail to 71, according to an eWEEK report. The added languages are Afrikaans, Armenian, Azerbaijani (Azeri), Chinese (Hong Kong), French (Canada), Galician, Georgian, Khmer, Lao, Mongolian, Nepali, Sinhala and Zulu.
Some of the new languages now supported by Gmail had already been rolled out previously as part of other Google services, including Google Search, Maps, Drive, Docs and YouTube, according to Google.
With the addition of the 13 languages, Gmail languages now cover 94 percent of the world’s Internet population, so they can use the service in their native languages, according to Google.
In December 2013, Google added nine more languages—including five in Africa—to its offerings, raising its support to translations for 80 languages. The additional African languages were Hausa, spoken in Nigeria and neighboring countries; Igbo, spoken in Nigeria; Yoruba, spoken in Nigeria and neighboring countries; Somali, spoken in Somalia and other countries around the Horn of Africa; and Zulu, spoken in South Africa and other southwestern African countries.
Translate also added language support for Mongolian, which is the official language in Mongolia and is also spoken in parts of China by 6 million native speakers; Nepali, which is spoken in Nepal and India by 17 million native speakers; and Punjabi, which is spoken in India and Pakistan by 100 million native speakers. Also added was support for Maori, which is spoken in New Zealand by 160,000 native speakers.
In November 2013, Google made its Google Translate language translation app for Android faster and expanded its coverage to several additional foreign languages, including Malay and Ukranian.
The Translate app, introduced in 2010, allows users to speak into an Android device to get a translation into another language or to use a built-in handwriting feature to get translations. Those capabilities are useful for travelers when they are in places where non-native languages are spoken.
The latest version of Google Translate includes more language support for the built-in handwriting feature, which now gives users the ability to directly write words in Hebrew, Javanese and Esperanto on their devices so they can be translated on the fly. Users can also use the camera translation feature to take a photo of written text with an Android device and then highlight the words they’d like to be translated. So far, Google Translate supports translations for more than 80 languages.