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Google updated the Google Translate iOS app today adding iPad support. It's the same set of features as the iPhone version, but the iPad is a great place for a free translator. Technophiles are reading more on tablets lately, and a free Google Translate app is a boon for a more literate, global wired society.

Google Translate has been available on the iPhone since the mobile Web version launched in 2008. The native app released last year added the voice-to-text feature as well as the spoken translations from Google's voice synthesizer. As one should expect, the translations are never perfect, but they're great for getting the gist.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg once said, when asked when we would finally see an iPad app for the social networking service, "iPad isn't mobile. It's a computer, sorry." The implication was that there would never be a Facebook app for Apple's tablet computer, because, frankly, it didn't need one.

Now, according to a new report, things may have changed. An official iPad app for Facebook could be only be weeks away.

Twitter has announced it will soon grow from its current offering of English and Japanese only to include versions in French, Italian, German, and Spanish.

However, as their translation team now comprises just five staffers, Twitter is asking users to suggest translations for the website. "We are inviting a small group of people to become volunteer translators at first," wrote co-founder Biz Stone on the company blog. "As more folks volunteer, the translation suggestions should accumulate faster, and we'll have enough material to respond."

Google is now giving webmasters the ability to prompt users for automatic translations of their pages. With the new website translator gadget, site owners can paste a short snippet of code into their websites and instantly increase their reach to up to 51 languages.

The gadget will automatically detect a user's preferred language, and if that user's language settings differ from the content on the gadget-enabled website, a frame will appear over the web page, prompting the user to click a button for instant translation of all text content.

According to an announcement on the Google blog, Google Toolbar users can now instantly translate web pages with a single click.

The toolbar is only available for Internet Explorer and Firefox, and this new feature has apparently only been rolled out for IE as far as we can tell. The functionality is hit and miss, as you'll see in the screenshots below.