This week’s App Smart was about apps that help you to learn foreign languages in far more clever and enjoyable ways than with the fusty old textbooks of your school years.
But what if you simply need a quick bit of translation as part of your learning experience?
The Say Hi translation app.Your options begin, of course, with Google Translate on iOS or Android. It’s ever more powerful, and the list of languages it supports has become longer over time (including Latin, nowadays). But if Google is a bit dry and uninspiring for you, then you should check out the SayHi Translate app for $1 on iOS. It’s new, it has already been updated and it has 33 languages at its command. It may be very useful when you’re trying to understand a complex piece of spoken language, and it’s possibly the most enjoyable way to practice your accent.
It works by receiving an audio input, which it then sends over the network to some advanced voice recognition software. The results are reported back to the display in a way similar to threaded text chats. So you can grab some speech from a TV show in, say, Spanish, and see how the app translates it. Then you can try speaking the phrase yourself to see how well you pronounced the words. There are two buttons that enable tap-to-speak, one for each language: if you’re confused about a translation, you can tap the other button and say the phrase in English — which can help you understand what went wrong.
The fun comes from the fact that machine translation is sometimes still a little inaccurate, and if your foreign accent is terrible the phrases the app returns in English can be hilarious. It’s a simple, harmless way to add some amusement to learning to speak another tongue. While it does go astray if there’s too much background noise — or music in a TV show you’re trying to translate — it’s very easy to use, visually arresting and great fun.
Word Lens, the clever printed-text live translator we’ve previously talked about in App Smart, has been updated. It has a better user interface and a $5 in-app purchase option of live-translating Italian to English and vice versa. It’s now also an Android app.
Microsoft’s offering of the free Translator app on Windows Phone 7 tries to outdo all of these. It combines a word-of-the-day vocabulary teaser, downloadable languages and phrase books so you can still get help even if you’re overseas, where a mobile data connection may be too expensive for a Word Lens-like text translator and a voice recognition system.
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