If you need to quickly translate a word from one language to another, you can easily and rapidly do so with Google Translate. Seeing the translated word in front of your eyes is great – but what if it is such a complicated word that you cannot figure out how to pronounce it? No problem- Google Translate comes with a text-to-speech feature. Simply click the speaker icon next to the translation and you will hear the translation.

So far this is not exactly news. The fact that the text-to-speech feature provides support for English, Haitian Creole, French, Italian, German, Hindi and Spanish is not news as well. The news is that Google Translate has added support for even more languages for the text-to-speech feature thanks to eSpeak, an open source speech synthesizer.

Text-to-speech functionality has been integrated for the following languages:Afrikaans, Albanian, Catalan, Chinese (Mandarin), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Latvian, Macedonian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Swahili, Swedish, Turkish, Vietnamese and Welsh.

“You may notice that the audio quality of these languages isn’t at the same level as the previously released languages. Clear and accurate speech technology is difficult to perfect, but we will continue to improve the performance and number of languages that are supported,” commented Fergus Henderson, Software Engineer.

To get started with Google Translate, please click here.

In related news, you should know that Google Goggles, the application that lets you search for something by simply taking a picture of it, can now translate text from pictures. This is to say that you can take a picture of a menu written in French, and the application will translate what that menu says.

In further related news, you may want to know that several new features have been added to Google Translator Toolkit.