Translations to go
Today’s app is a must-have. Google translate does exactly what the name suggests: it translates texts and spoken phrases between more than 50 languages. Only available on the Android market for quite some time it has recently been released for iOS, making it available on the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. It’s a Google app, so it naturally comes for free.
It couldn’t be easier to get a decent instant translation, not even with any of the numerous web interfaces we know of. Phrases can be entered via text input or by using the microphone of your mobile device. Voice recognition works for more than 15 languages. And by ‘work’ we mean ‘works like a charm’. The recognition rate is impressively high and somehow we wouldn’t expect anything else from Google. Just recently Mike Cohen confirmed the importance of speech for Google’s future innovation in search. This neat little app actually makes us believe him.
Text output even works in full screen mode when you flip your device into horizontal position or press the button. This might be really handy when you are travelling abroad. It makes it easy to show a local in his native tongue what you want to tell him but couldn’t because you never bothered to learn the language.
Speech output works in 23 languages. As far as we could test (we actually bothered learning some languages) it seems easy to understand with a good, if slightly mechanic pronunciation.
One drawback of the app is the required internet connection to fetch the translations from Google’s servers. Especially in the above mentioned situation of travelling abroad you might be faced with a hefty roaming bill if you don’t have a flatrate. We assume that the ability to save and remember phrases for later use is Google’s attempt at going easy on your wallet.
All together a really useful and well programmed app for translations on the go.
Datasheet:
Price: – free
System: – iOS min. 3.0
Size: – 1,9MB
Language: – quite a lot :)
Advertisements: – no
optimized for Retina Display (iPhone4): – yes
Multitasking: – yes
Universal-App: – no
Push-Notification: – no
Download:
Appstore
Screenshots
Screenshots are taken from the German app, if you prefer English screenshots visit the official Google blog.
MO/SdP
