Free Translator

Yet another of Google’s free contributions to the online world is their language translation service, also available in Safari or any other web browser, of course. Google also makes the API (application interface) for the service available to programmers and CoDesign’s Free Translator is a good example of a mobile client that hooks into the big ‘G’s data and provides a friendlier interface. The developers use the client to rather push their own range of offline translation tools, but this is easily forgiven.

As with Google ’s Translate service itself (translate.google.com), there are dozens of languages to choose from for the ’source’ and ‘target’, although quite a number of them involve non-Western characters – translations appear perfectly on the iPhone screen and can be read directly by the non-English speaker you’re trying to converse with, but in many cases you may be able to get a translation for a phrase but you may not be able to actually pronounce it. Still, it’s a lot better than nothing. There’s the facility to send off the translated phrase by email, with even the most alien character sets correctly ported across into the iPhone OS Mail application.

Of course, given the dependence on Google Translate, you’ll need to be online when running Free Translator, unlikely to be a problem in your home country but which might be an issue when taking your iPhone abroad – when you might need a translator most. This is a necessary limitation though and one which can be avoided by taking the developers up on their offline app offer.

Selection of both source and target languages is by stepping back through dialogs on-screen, a system which works well enough but which necessitates moving through and setting the target language yet again if you want to go ‘back’ far enough to set the source. Slightly clumsy, although in fairness you’re not going to want to change the source language very often (it will usually stay set as your mother tongue).

The quality of translation is generally very good indeed. Google’s resources have made sure that this is the case and you can type in the most abstract sentences and something sensible will emerge. The results won’t seem perfect to the fluent recipient but they’re certainly good enough to make yourself understood. Entering text is done with the standard iPhone keyboard and, thankfully, full writing aids are available. Lack of copy and paste in iPhone OS means that you can’t paste in text from another application or document, but again you can’t blame the developers of Free Translator for this limitation.

A super little free tool and one to pack for your upcoming trip provided you’re confident of there being data and/or Wi-Fi access where you’re going!