TAG | Google tunes language translation for iPhone with web app |
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| by Alex Zaharov-Reutt | |
| Sunday, 10 August 2008 | |
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Page 1 of 2 This means that you’ll need to be online to use the translation capabilities, but testing of the app has shown around 200-400 translations per 1mb of data, giving you pretty good value for the highly inflated cost of international data roaming. The iPhone web app is thanks to Google software engineer, Allen Hutchison. He’d been planning a trip to Austria and Italy and looked for portable language dictionaries, as well as trying the standard Google Translate page on the iPhone. Realising that “the web page didn’t work that well on the iPhone”, Hutchison team up with his fellow engineer David Singleton to “build an iPhone interface for Google Translate.” As Hutchison notes in his blog entry, “Google Translate for iPhone is optimized for speed, supports all of the existing Google Translate language pairs, and uses a client-side data-store on your iPhone to hang on to your past translations so you always have them at hand, even if you can't use the local data network.” He continued: “We wrote this using the AJAX Language API, so every time the Google Translate team updates the languages they support, the languages will automatically be added here.” One issue he discovered when he went on his trip was that while the service did work, his pronunciation wasn’t too good, meaning that at times he needed to hold the iPhone up to people so they could read the translation for themselves. That led to some commenters in his blog suggesting future versions could speak the words on the screen instead through the iPhone’s speaker, although my simple suggestion would be for Google to provide a phonetic pronunciation guide on screen for different words, something that would be a useful addition to any future text-to-speech capability. But what about data costs? After all, as noted above, international data costs are ridiculously astronomical. It’s a mind bogglingly stupid situation, but until carriers stop being so greedy and realise globalisation is meant to bring costs of voice and data roaming, too (despite efforts from companies like 3 Mobile and Vodafone), costs will remain way higher than what you’ll pay in your home country where translation services aren’t normally required. Please read on to page 2. Continuez lire, s’il vous plait, a page deux... |
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