Archive for: translation

Google Officially Launches Google Translate iPhone App

Google has launched the official Google Translate iPhone application. The new app has all of the features of the web app, plus some significant new additions designed to improve your overall translation experience.

Speak to translate – The new app accepts voice input for 15 languages, and—just like the web app—you can translate a word or phrase into one of more than 50 languages. For voice input, just press the microphone icon next to the text box and say what you want to translate.

Listen to your translations – You can also listen to your translations spoken out loud in one of 23 different languages. This feature uses the same new speech synthesizer voices as the desktop version of Google Translate we introduced last month.

Full-screen modeAnother feature that might come in handy is the ability to easily enlarge the translated text to full-screen size. This way, it’s much easier to read the text on the screen, or show the translation to the person you are communicating with. Just tap on the zoom icon to quickly zoom in.

And the app also includes all of the major features of the web app, including the ability to view dictionary results for single words, access your starred translations and translation history even when offline, and support romanized text like Pinyin and Romaji.

You can download Google Translate now from the App Store globally. The app is available in all iOS supported languages, but you’ll need an iPhone or iPod touch iOS version 3 or later.

My Gengo – Translation by People, Not Computers

One of the emerging trends in the online world is to have a translation service. Google Translate is probably the best well known with ad-ons and blog widgets to help people translate web pages, documents and the likes. However, the problem is that it’s often a little too ‘literal’ meaning some sentences don’t make sense when translated. They get ‘lost in translation’, if you will.

My Gengo allow users to upload a document, have it translated by a professional and then returned to them at a very low rate (normally 70% lower than freelance translators charge on sites like Elance). I think this is a great idea. A few times I have needed letters and documents translated for my business and have had to spend quite a lot of money to ensure they’re translated properly – especially when I’m sending them to a client or a potential one.

The site offers translation services between languages like English, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, Italian and Russian. They recently received investment from tech entrepreneur Dave McClure so it looks like this start-up might just be a success in the near future.