Electronic Translator

English is widely spoken by everyone in the tourist industry in Prague. I say phrasebook.

We bought the Jibiggio app for our Ipod. It's sold one language at a time. It works okay. You type something in and it gives you a translation (both written and spoken). It helped a little but is fairly slow (typing a phrase in on the Ipod) and requires patience. It's suppose to have voice recognition, but that never worked for me. My wife bought a dedicated electronic translater maybe five years ago. I tried using it to interpret menus, signs, etc. It was about as useful as a paperweight. It never found the word I was looking for, most of the time it found a different word completely, the rest of the time it didn't find anything. I'd learn polite words and use them, bring a phrasebook, and rely on the many English speakers there.

I also have jibbigo and found it to be more helpful than a phrasebook for signage, menus, etc. as you could type in the whole phrase and it was usually close enough for me to understand. It also meant no phrase book to carry and it works offline on your iphone. Was about $5 per language. I used the Spanish one. But, in Prague, lots of people speak English, but there are many times I want to know what something means, so the translator is helpful. Voice recognition did not work well for me either.