This week Google introduced a new look and feel for it’s online translation service, Google Translate.

Previously the system allowed the user to input the foreign word or phrase and then hit the “Translate” button to view the answer. This, of course, wasn’t that much of a chore but the instant translation sure feels a whole lot better – even if the results aren’t.

I did a quick test with a recent twitter from dannychoo.

Input: アーマー部品日本に置いてきちゃった！

Entering this tweet with the exclamation mark resulted in “Armor Parts I left it in Japan!” but removing the exclamation mark gave me a whole different answer – “I left it in Japanese Armor Parts”. I tested with several other Japanese phrases and received similar quality results.

For a free service, it is great and will certainly give you a good idea of what is being said but let’s just say that I wouldn’t use it to do up a resume for that job at Microsoft in Tokyo you really wanted to nail. (^_^)

Other improvements are the ability to view a romanisation of phrases written in the likes of Japanese or Chinese and for non-English speaking users the new text-to-speech service will provide an audio snippet for the translated word or phrase. Hopefully this is extended to other languages, like Japanese, in the future.

See the video below for a full overview of the new features.