New gesture support and improved language recognition from handwriting and images
The latest version of the Google Translate app is making it even easier to have conversations between languages. The latest update, which will begin rolling out to users today, makes it easier to converse with someone by just activating the app then turning the phone between two people. You now simply select the languages you'd like to translate between, tap the microphone and speak your sentence or phrase, and turn it to the other person.
Gesture support detects when you turn to the other person, and translates what you said, then prompts them to speak back to you. Once you get going back and forth, the experience will be much more conversational than before, hopefully lowering the boundaries of speaking to someone in another language.
For times when you want to translate written input, the latest update also expands handwriting input to Hebrew, Greek, Javanese and Esperanto. If you don't want to write, you can always capture text with your phone's camera and translate any selected portion if you'd like — now supporting Malay and Ukranian.
Source: Google Translate Blog
