Google Translate App Takes on the Classic Ritchie Valens Song ‘La Bamba’ to Demonstrate How It Works

To demonstrate how the Google Translate app works, Google employees tested it on signs printed with the lyrics to the Ritchie Valens song “La Bamba.” The app takes printed text from one language and almost instantly replaces it on a smartphone screen with translated text in another. To understand exactly how the app works, Google employees Nat & Lo spoke with Octavio Good, one of the creators of Word Lens, the app on which the Google Translate feature shown in the “La Bamba” video is based.