Translation of the Day: Google Shows Off a New App While Singing La Bamba

It's no babel fish but Google Translate seems to be quite an amazing way to take 27 different other languages with you wherever you go.

As the engineers behind the updated app wrote on the official Google blog, it seems to work exactly as shown in the video.

The Google Translate app already lets you instantly visually translate printed text in seven languages. Just open the app, click on the camera, and point it at the text you need to translate—a street sign, ingredient list, instruction manual, dials on a washing machine. You'll see the text transform live on your screen into the other language. No Internet connection or cell phone data needed.

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.

Microsoft has been reaching towards this goal of instant translation as well, mostly through Skype. They released this video of a terrified girl showing off the technology last December, but unfortunately, no one sings La Bamba.