Google Translate wants to give you more control with alternative translations

Many of us have spent the last couple years learning that modern AI does some things a whole lot better than others. While it sometimes misreports facts, “hallucinating” details, it tends to do a pretty decent job at stringing a few words together — even incorrect results don’t end up sounding like gibberish. That makes translation a pretty obvious target for AI’s skill set, and today we’ve spotted what looks like some new AI-powered functionality Google’s working on for its Translate app.

Google’s been working on some AI upgrades in Translate for a while now — it’s coming up on nearly a year ago since we first spotted the yet-to-be-added “Ask a Follow-up” button that could help deliver extra contextual info about translation results. More recently, that’s been looking like it may take the form of separate “Understand” and “Ask” buttons when it arrives.

Ahead of that, we’ve identified one more addition developers have been building for Translate: the ability to view alternative translations.

For this, we’re looking at version 10.0.36.855137688.3-release of Google Translate for Android. Right now, none of this is visible in the app — pull it up today, and you’ll see what we have on the left here. But once we force the app to show us those in-development “Understand” and “Ask” buttons, we’re now also getting this new “Show alternatives” option.

Hitting that allows us to pull up three alternate translations, each with slightly different emphasis — in this case, exactly how to denote divisions of a business. While we’d like to hope that Translate could automatically work out subtleties of meaning like that, it’s also nice to get some actual input in the translation process, especially for edge cases when our intended meaning may not be perfectly clear.

One tricky bit with many languages, especially when it’s not a major component of your native tongue, is how they handle formality — how the words you use change depending on your relationship with the person you’re speaking to. With “Show alternatives,” we see Translate helping users navigate some of those choices.

Honestly, this feels like one of the bigger improvements to come to Google Translate in a while — right up there with its language-learning Practice mode. Well, it will be, when it actually get here, anyway. But as you can see from the video demo above, all the pieces are largely in place already for this, and it feels like Google just needs to decide when it’s ready to actually flip the switch live.