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Android Q is still unnamed, but whatever Google names it, the system update to Android will be a sweet treat, indeed. New screenshots show that Android Q could very well bring Google Translate to the Recents screen.
According to the images Google Translate appears as “pill-shaped” on-screen button whenever you have a page in the Recents menu that shows a non-native language. English speakers will see Google Translate appear in the Recents menu when reading a text in German, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, and so on.
Tapping the “Google Translate” button will bring up the translation in a popup window with “Google Translate” at the top, followed by the original language of the statement (the unknown language) and then the conversion language (the known language, the one you understand). The new Translate is similar to Google’s Tap to Translate feature with the OCR addition from Android Pie.
Now, while Google Translate in the Recents screen or menu is an intriguing new addition to the upcoming Android Q update, it appears as though the feature will be exclusive only to Pixel phone users initially, as the new feature was found in the Pixel Launcher and labeled a “proactive suggestion.”
The Pixel exclusivity of this feature, however, doesn’t mean it’ll remain so; since Google is Android’s owner, and a number of Pixel-exclusive features have made their way to other Android phones and tablets over time, it’s likely that Google Translate in the Recents menu is an upcoming feature for Android users across the board, not just Pixel owners.
Google Translate already exists within Android, but it is a feature exclusive to Google’s Chrome web browser, currently. Only using Chrome can one take advantage of Google Translate. Google’s effort to move Google Translate to the Recents screen and make it more of an accessible feature is to be applauded.
Google Translate has had some changes to it in the last few years. It has been updated with new word definitions, an account switcher, added support for India’s regional languages such as Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu.
Google has added neural machine translation to see to it that English can be converted into nine Indian languages, including Malayalam, Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, and others. The Rajpal & Sons Hindi dictionary has been brought over to Google Search as a partnership with Oxford University.
Last year, Google gave Google Translate its Material Design language upgrade as a celebration of the feature’s twelve years of existence within Android, and announced support for translation into 103 languages apart from just Arabic and English as well as offline translation support.
Google’s decision to bring Google Translate to the Recents menu is to be applauded not only because of its usefulness, but because of just how used the feature is. Google said last year that Translate converts 30 trillion sentences or phrases each year.
The Pixel phones’ exclusivity over Google Translate in Recents isn’t bothersome to Samsung, who’s already baked its own Translate feature (which piggybacks on Google Translate) into the Galaxy Note lineup. Samsung debuted “Translate” (the exact name of the feature) on the ill-fated Galaxy Note 7 but has made improvements to the feature over the last two years in the Galaxy Note 8 and more recently, the Galaxy Note 9 announced last Fall.
The Galaxy Note 9’s Translate feature lets you use the coveted S Pen to hover the pen over words and see either a word, sentence, or entire paragraph or text translated. The translation appears in a popup window on the page and you can tap on the window, where you are taken to a screen where you can see the translation on a full page.
Google’s Translate feature, baked in Google’s mobile Chrome browser, is already integrated into Chromebooks, where pages are translated automatically when the language detected is not English or the user’s native language.
