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Translation Apps Assist Travelers on the Road

Translation Apps Assist Travelers on the Road

This week Google released Google Translate for iPhone app. It’s a mobile version of Google Translate HTML5, which was released in 2008. This app marks a long way from when travelers had to carry phrase books and handheld translaters that required you to type a word or phrase, which then spit out a rudimentary translation.

With the Google Translate app, you can type in a phrase and it will return the query in just about any language worldwide. You can also speak your word or phrase and it will give you the translation, in any language. If you aren’t adventurous enough to try your tongue, you can show the iPhone to the person you’re speaking to, or tap on the speaker button to have the translation spoken.

Like Rosetta Stone, Google Translate can be used to learn a language by hearing the foreign dialect. The nice thing is that you can choose the phrases to learn. For a business traveler, you can query very specific phrases to get translation just for your situation.

Google Translate app accepts voice input for 15 languages, can speak translation in 23 languages. The app can translate into more than 50 languages. Those 50 languages require typing words or phrases rather than audibly speaking the query.

As with the web app, you can view dictionary results for single words, just as in a phrase book from yesterday.

The app arrives just over a year too late for me, when I went on a tour of several countries in the Eastern Mediterranean. I spent an afternoon wandering the markets in Kusadasi in Turkey looking for a street I’d heard about that had several yarn shops, an item most tourists aren’t on the lookout for. Somewhere between not knowing how to speak Turkish and it being an unusual request, I almost didn’t find it. I passed a store where a woman sat crocheting baby items. I stopped to ask her, but she knew very little English. She dashed to the store next to hers and returned with a Turkish to English dictionary and we communicated, slowly. She then drew me the most amazing map and I was able to find two stores.

With Google Translate I may have missed that experience, but my quest would have been much shorter and I might have had time to explore other scenery more leisurely. In business situations, it can mean the difference between thinking you know what you’re saying and knowing what you’re saying to your contact.

The Google Translate app is free and competes with a number of translation apps, most of those come at a price starting at $99. Anyone familiar with the Google Translate app for the web can tell you that this free app is reliable and offers translation in a number of languages to get you around the world and back.

[Thanks: http://www.allbusiness.com ]

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