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.

The iPad UI is the slightest bit strange. When you paste text into the box, it scoots up, so the language choice buttons go away. You have to pull it down from a very thin tab to get it back (or hit cancel and start over). There's also no 'Translate' button, only 'Go' on the keyboard. There's plenty of room for that under the voice-to-text button, so let this be a humble, simple feature request.

But that's all very nitpicky. I have no right to complain about an app that will translate text into 64 different languages, many of which it will read aloud to you, for free. The future rocks.

Download Google Translate for iOS from the App Store.

Do you know of any other good translator apps?

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

Nice move, Facebook. We almost believed you.

After all, the iPad is a computer, not a smartphone that requires a specialized experience due to a smaller screen size. That Facebook would simply optimize its website for the Safari Web browser and leave it at that was certainly believable. In fact, that same sort of optimization is reportedly on its way, too.

Facebook Let 3rd-Party Apps Dominate for Too Long

But the longer Facebook waited to release an official app, the more third-party services rushed in to fill the void. Today, apps like Friendly, iFace, MyPad and others sit at the top of the charts in the iTunes App Store for iPad, indications of the demand for a native Facebook experience.

With some 25 million iPad users, it's odd that the world's largest social networking service has ignored the tablet market for so long. But that may have been a political maneuver on its part. Facebook and Apple have been at odds in the past - for example, when Apple launched its iTunes social networking service Ping, it pulled the Facebook integration at the last minute, citing "onerous terms we could not agree to." And more recently, Apple announced that Twitter, not Facebook, would be the social networking service deeply integrated into iOS 5, the next version of Apple's mobile operating system.

But if the delayed launch of Facebook iPad app had to do with politics, and not its technical nature, the only one really hurt was Facebook itself. Not all of the third-party apps deliver a great experience for end users, leaving frustrated customers with negative feelings towards the brand. That should change soon, too, says the report. Apple plans to feature the official app prominently in the App Store, one source said.

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."

We've long been interested in Yahoo! Meme, which built its user base by launching in Portuguese only, then expanding to Spanish and, more recently, English. Some of these sites are more obviously direct rip-offs of Twitter, such as the Spanish Birddi. In fact, the Twitter fan wiki lists 28 foreign-language Twitter clones and links to this exhaustive list of more than 200 microblogging sites around the world.

Some of these sites have stronger, more established communities than others. Some of the URLs have been sold, and we're sure that some will be shut down for obvious trademark infringement or other legal reasons as Twitter expands its reach globally. Still, a few will remain in each market as viable competitors (and possible acquisitions).

Another thought we've had is that this will bring Twitter into the same arena as MySpace, Facebook and other larger properties in terms of having a large enough base of users to justify its valuation and ensure its continued success. Sure, Twitter is the tech scene's darling, and MySpace is an ironic bit of ancient history to hardcore geeks. But MySpace still controls a large share of many international markets and, perhaps for that reason alone, still gets enough eyeballs to remain competitive.

According to a Compete.com report earlier this year, Twitter saw around 6 million unique visitors in January of this year, making it the third largest social website on the Internet. MySpace had about ten times as many visitors. Facebook, which made translated versions of its site a priority some time ago, saw 68 million unique visitors.

And if you've ever doubted whether Facebook and Twitter are competitors, take a look at this Inside Facebook report on that network's international growth, which has surged to the point that Facebook's international users make up a full 70% of the site's users. Will those accustomed to using Facebook status updates as their microblogging platform of choice see the point of adopting Twitter?

Is an international scope, starting with FIGS translations, going to take Twitter over the top and make it a major-league player in social networking worldwide? And how will it deal with robust microblogging competition in international markets? Let us know what you think in the comments.

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.

Of course, the new feature will only work as well as Google Translate, which project manager Jeff Chin admits is best used to let readers "get the gist" of a page. Still, giving webmasters control over how users see their pages - with minimal effort and no downloads on the user's part - will likely do a lot to expand both the reach of a given website and the breadth of information available to Internet users around the world.

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.

Here, we can see Amazon.de translated, and not too badly:

However, on this French site, the language wasn't automatically detected, and the text didn't get translated at all, even though Google said it had done so:

Another reason we're not in love with the translation feature is that it doesn't automatically translate pages once you start navigating around a site. Although the Google blog states, "If you go to another page in the same language, you will continue to see translations rather than have to translate one page at a time," we did not consistently find this to be the case in our own testing. For example, we were surfing Chinese.AOL.com and had to ask Google to translate with each click through to another page on the same domain.

Another feature of the toolbar translation is real-time translation of dynamic content, which we found worked in Google Reader and FriendFeed just fine.

The translations were not perfect but were on par with other results we've seen historically from Google Translate. Overall, for users who still choose Internet Explorer and who navigate a lot of foreign language sites, this might be a good tool.