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Google Translate on Android now offers real-time automated audio translation for 14 languages, according to a Google blog post earlier today. The new languages include Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Polish, Russian and Turkish. The new version is in alpha, so expect some bugs. The first version of Google Translate for Android with Conversation Mode launched back in January 2011, and offered only English to Spanish translations.

If you've never read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, know three things - the guide is this really cool book that knows everything about the universe, everyone in that universe can communicate with each other, and you're really missing out on a great story. What's that have to do with anything?

Google today added even more languages to Google Translate for Android and it reminded us of how much closer we are getting to a reality where smartphones will break down language barriers in real-time as we wend our way through the world.

Google has had a web-based translation app for several years. But today, it's released an official iPhone app that adds a few more bells and whistles to your ability to talk and translate on the go.

You can input a word or phrase for translation by typing the text or by talking into the phone. The new iPhone app accepts voice input from 15 languages, and just like the existing web app, lets you translate that phrase into one of more than 50 languages.

Google Translate on Android will now perform real-time, automated audio translation for conversations between English and Spanish speakers, Google announced in a blog post today.

The service is just beginning and is reported to be very experimental. Franz Och, head of Google's translation services, said in February of 2010 that this new service should "work reasonably well in a few years' time." Given the wide range of languages, accents and intonations in the world, we probably shouldn't expect this to be much more than a gimmick yet.

What's the first thing you do when you run across something on the Web in a language you don't understand? Head straight to Google Translate, of course. That's exactly what happened when Google announced the addition of Latin - in a blog post written entirely in Latin - to its arsenal of nearly 60 languages this morning.

In a blog post entitled "Veni, Vidi, Verba Verti", or "I came, I saw, I translated the words", Google announced it would begin offering "the first language translation system by which no native speakers now make use of: the Latin."

While the majority of Twitter users reside within the United States, there is also a massive international population of users sharing info and links in various languages around the world. Tweetmeme, a service for sharing and tracking links on Twitter, announced today that it serves a half of a billion retweet button impressions each day on nearly 200,000 websites worldwide. To keep up with this growth, and the international Twitter community, the service is rolling out support for languages on buttons as well as automatic translation for retweets made on its site.

Google is continuing with its effort to become the one-stop translation shop, announcing today that it has added speech capabilities to more languages on Google Translate, its polylingual text translation tool.

The feature uses the open-source speech synthesizer eSpeak to turn text into sound, giving Google Translate users the ability to hear how the words they're seeing are supposed to be pronounced.

If our attempts at getting such simple information as bus schedules or account balances from automated voice recognition systems are any indication, then we imagine Google has a lot of work to do in its latest endeavor - real-time, spoken-language translation.

Mloovi is a new app that runs any RSS feed through Google Translate. This may not be perfect, but there's is a clear need for such a service so we're pretty excited about it.

Created by the makers of language learning service LearnLists, Mloovi is free with ads and offers premium accounts. The company credits TechCrunch UK's Mike Butcher with the inspiration, and Butcher's blog is where we discovered the service.