For you travelers… just purchased this language app for the Iphone and WOW. This is what a language translator is supposed to do! You talk into it, and it translates in voice.
I’m slowly learning Spanish, but this translator is the sh%$. I have another on my phone that only works if connected to a 'net connection and only works in text, making it close to useless.
This one is darn close to Star Trek Universal translator good! I can only imagine how good this technology will be i the very near future.
This has been an ongoing DoD project for the last decade, and so far the only really useful spinoff has been Siri (on the iPhone), the rest has been ‘tactical’ translator models with all the above defecits you mention, but are costing tens of thousands of dollars to run.
The real test is somebody who knows the language running it - for those who ‘need’ it they won’t understand when syntax is hopelessly wrong, word choice is off (sometimes offensive), or it’s just using the wrong English word to translate.
That said, I do want to try it, or at least see which translation tool it’s reaching back to and copying databases. Also not shocked that the Iraqi-English is the priciest one.
Will it work with no connection to the 'net? I have several translators on my Iphone and learned how worthless they were when I went to use one and it didn’t work without net access.
I just tried the iHandy translator on my iphone and it does work without wifi cnxn…
evidently I tried it before in “Airplane Mode” and it removed the microphone/speech to text conversion but the speech-to-text conversion is available with simply no internet access. I guess it uses the 3G cnxn.
again, it’s not speech-to-speech translation but it does give speech-to-text without wifi. you just have to read it to them…
haha, a few years ago I was in Italy to race motorcycles and I prepared for a solid month with Italian language lessons. since I was with a team of Americans I found little opportunity to use my new language skills.
needing to ask directions, I came up to a cop and began earnestly to ask in his native language when he stopped me and said, “please, speaka de english”… :blink:
It’s a good back up that I have yet to actually use in real time. What I do use it for is to get a translation for myself which I find very helpful. I want to know how to say X and tells me quickly, and now I know what I need to say and how. For me, that’s been the real value of it so far.
We didn’t have too much luck with the phrase-lator (I can’t reember if that was its name). SOCOM kept offering to turn the units over to the Marines. The problem that they were having is that the locals would get offended talking and listening to a electronic gizmo instead of the person talking to them.
Makes sense. I have no real interest to stick a phone under their nose to talk into and I don’t think it would be terribly well received, but I find it’s very help with learning the language and could make a back up for communication in an emergency and so forth.
Having it with me in Panama worth having for sure.
