Originally, the tool only supported English-to-Spanish translation (or vice versa). Now, Google says 14 languages in all are covered: Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Polish, Russian, Spanish and Turkish.

The announcement comes a day before the iPhone 4S will be arriving to the public, with its vaunted Siri spoken assistant. Don’t confuse the two.

Google Translate is designed to translate from one language to another, which is pretty cool. The Siri assistant is designed to help you more easily search for things and complete tasks by speaking, which is also cool, but a different type of cool.

Google’s posted a video explaining more about how the translation works:

Click here to view the embedded video.

To use the feature, search for “Google Translate” in the Android Market on your particular phone. It can also be found here.

The other night, a friend and I were trying to figure out what a bright star in the sky was. How could we possibly do a search for that? Type a query like “what’s that really bright star in the middle of the sky if you’re facing, erm, I have no idea what direction we’re facing, and I don’t have to tilt my head up too high to see it and I’m 5′ 4″, so however high up that would be, and oh right, it’s January and I’m in California”? Turns out, we easily searched for it and found the right answer in seconds (it was Venus). He just pointed his iPhone to the sky.

Google has been investing in “what do these words mean that are in a different language” searches for a while (Google Translate, Google Goggles). Today, they’ve taken that one step further with their latest Google Translate iPhone app. You can just talk right into the phone and have the translation read back to you out loud.

What is the future of search? It’s your very own Babel Fish replacing frantic searches through a beat up translation dictionary when you’re in a small town in Estonia and need to find a bathroom.

pv zk pv pv zk pv zk kz zk pv pv pv zk pv zk zk pzk pzk pvzkpkzvpvzk kkkkkk bsch

Here is a video demo of the beatbox in action:

eekosystem noted that HackerNews documented a rudiment/instrument notation guide for Google Translate. Here it is:

zk = suspended cymbal
bschk = snare
pv = brush
bk = bass
tk = flam1
vk = roll tap
kt = flam2
kttp = flam tap
krp = hi hat tap
pv = short roll
th = better hi hat
thp, ds = instant rimshot.

(1) Google Translate added Latin as a new language. Google said, “although considered a “dead language” by many, Latin is still studied by hundreds of thousands of students worldwide and is the predecessor to many modern tongues.” I am sure those who study in this language welcome it to Google Translate.

(2) Google has updated their flu shot location search in collaboration with the U.S. Department for Health and Human Services (HHS). The flu season is right around the corner and it might pay for you to get your shot early, if possible.

(3) Google Alerts for Video added 40 languages. Google Alerts added video alerts a few years ago, but only in the English language. Now it is available in English and 39 additional languages, including Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian and Spanish.

The video demo below shows how one person is talking English to another person, who responds in German. The app works where you talk in one language to the app, the app then converts it to a desired language verbally over speaker phone, then the other person speaks his/her language back into the phone and the app translates that back in your language verbally over speaker phone. To me, this is an extremely futuristic and exciting feature.

Here is the demo:

Google said, Goggles can read English, French, Italian, German and Spanish and can translate to many more languages. They are working towards other Latin-based languages and eventually read non-Latin languages. You can download Goggles v1.1 for free on devices running Android 1.6 and higher.

I have screen shots and a video of how it works below.

Start Screen:

View Screen:

Selecting Text with Cropping Tool:

Google Scanning Selected Text:

Google Offering Translation of Selected Text:

Here is a video demo, I hope the quality improves as YouTube processes the video over time:

Here is a screen capture:

As you can see, the keyboard icon is next to the search box. When you click on the icon, a keyboard opens up and lets you type on this virtual keyboard. Google said in their help document:

Our virtual keyboard allows you to enter the precise search terms you want, regardless of the language keys on your physical keyboard. It can be helpful for people who use one of the many non-Latin script-based languages that require special characters such as Arabic, Greek, and Thai.

I believe Google launched virtual keyboards in June 2009 for use on third-party web sites. Now they are using them on Google search results.

Hat tip Kasia and Istvan.

Postscript: Nine days after we wrote about this, the Google blog announced it. The languages that this has been integrated with include Albanian, Arabic, Armenian, Basque, Belarusian, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Finnish, Galician, Georgian, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Kazakh, Kirghiz, Macedonian, Malayalam, Mongolian, Persian, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Swedish, Tatar, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Uzbek. Missing your favorite language? Vote to add yours over here.

It appears that Google is a couple years away from this coming but they would build on their existing Google Translate and Google Voice features to create an instant translator. You would speak to it in any language, Google would then convert that and spit it back in the language of choice. Google Voice, Google Mobile search and similar products already take use of speech to text services. Google Translate already has some languages that speak to you. Bridging the two together and improving on the underlying technology, can make these feat possible.

Franz Och, Google’s head of translation services, told The Times Online:

We think speech-to-speech translation should be possible and work reasonably well in a few years’ time.

Clearly, for it to work smoothly, you need a combination of high-accuracy machine translation and high-accuracy voice recognition, and that’s what we’re working on.

If you look at the progress in machine translation and corresponding advances in voice recognition, there has been huge progress recently.

Postscript From Danny Sullivan: Google actually demonstrated this software live and working in December. See our Liveblogging The Google’s Web Search “Evolution” Event’ post from then.

• Automatic detection of languages other than your default language
• One click translation
• Client side (does not communicate with Google) language detection
• Automatic language translation on page clicks
• Real-time translation for dynamic content
• Auto translation feature (bypass click for translation) for frequent sites you visit

There are 41 different languages currently supported, including: Albanian, Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese.

The “notranslate” meta tag will block an entire page from being translated. It looks like this:

If you only want to keep Google from translating a certain piece of content within a page, the “notranslate” attribute can be added to any HTML element, like this:

On the other hand, if you get a lot of international visitors and want to make it easier for them to translate your content, Google has a new widget that can be placed into any web page. When it’s installed, the widget looks like this:

The widget will display in the user’s language, so even if someone can’t read the rest of your page, s/he will be able to use the widget.