Google Translate – iPhone App of the Week

Google Translate – iPhone App of the Week

This is a regular feature of the blog looking at various Apps available. Some of the apps will be useful for those involved in learning technologies, others will be useful in improving the way in which you work, whilst a few will be just plain fun! Some will be free, others will cost a little and one or two will be what some will think is quite expensive.

This week’s App is Google Translate.

Translate words and phrases between more than 50 languages using Google Translate for iOS. For most languages, you can speak your phrases and hear the corresponding translations.

With Google Translate, you can:

* Translate text between 57 languages
* Translate by voice by speaking the text instead of typing it (15 languages)
* Listen to your translations spoken aloud (23 languages)
* Display translations in full-screen mode to make it easier for others to read
* Star your favourite translations for quick access, even when you’re offline
* Access your translation history, even when you’re offline
* Spell out the translation of non-Latin script languages (e.g. Chinese, Japanese, etc.) in Latin characters to read it phonetically (e.g. Pinyin, Romaji)
* View additional dictionary results for single words or short phrases

Translation between the following languages are supported:

Afrikaans, Albanian, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Arabic, Basque, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, Georgian, German, Greek, Haitian Creole, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Irish, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Maltese, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese, Welsh, Yiddish

Free

I am a regular uses of Google’s translation facilities on the web, a recent example was using it to translate this webpage that linked to one of my presentations and podcasts.

It’s never perfect, but it certainly makes it possible to get a gist of what is been written.

Google now have an iPhone App that allows the power of the translation on your phone.

You do need to have an internet connection as the way the app works is to take the text upload it to the cloud, translate it and then send the translation back to the phone. So there is no actual translation happening on the phone. The advantage of this is that the power required to do this, doesn’t need to be on the phone. A similar process is used by Dragon Dictation for their voice recognition app.

Google have another feature of the app and that is the ability to talk to the phone in one language, that gets translated and you can hear the translation. This is quite cool in that you talk to the phone and the phone talks back to you in a different language.

As with all such translation services they are not perfect, but to get the gist of what is been said, for that they work very well.

Get Google Translate in the App Store.

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