New English<-->Italian Talking Translator for iPhone, iPod Touch

One drawback I've found is that you must have an Internet connection (by phone or Wi-Fi) for it to translate. That's a big drawback while traveling in Italy.

But it lets you save translations for later, so it still works fine if you save a lot of common phrases in advance. Then, when traveling, you can pull up the phrase you need and listen to its pronunciation to refresh your memory.

Talking Translators have been around for awhile, but only now becoming available for the IPod units. The firm www.beiks.com/ has had these for a few years in Palm, Windows Mobile and Blackberry formats, and I believe they're working on IPod versions at the present time. Their mobile Dictionaires are excellent!

There are other Talking Translators available from www.magellans.com/store/Translators___Language_Translators?Args=.

While I suppose there are some situations where these gadgets might be useful, the intent and the reality are often quite different and these are usually somewhat cumbersome to use in "real life" situations. It's a bit awkward to type a phrase for the machine to "speak", pass it to the local and have him/her type a phrase in reply, etc. If the local decides to reply with a few quick sentences instead, the Translator can't help with that. The fact that the IPod versions require a net connection for full functionality is a bit of a disadvantage.

In my experience so far, I've found the absolute BEST Translator is the one sitting on top of my shoulders, so I'll be continuing with my language lessons.

Cheers!

wow - I'm going to look this up right now - sounds great

As Ken says, talking translators are mainly a novelty toy. I've had the Beiks Spanish and Swedish software on my Palm for years, and never really used them that much, except to show the locals, who get a kick out of them.

Almost all Swedes speak excellent English, so no real need for one there, and most of the Spaniards I'm around also speak pretty good English. I find Italy different. In some parts of Italy, English doesn't always get you by.

I'd say the talking translators would be every bit as useful in Italy as a phrase book, and since you're already carrying the cell phone anyway, putting the software on it means nothing extra to carry. The fact that they also give you a native pronunciation might put them way ahead of the phrase book.

So, yes, you can't beat speaking the native language yourself. But short of that, a translator on your phone might be the next best thing.

I ended up going to itunes and downloading from Survivalphrases and the the UK site - so I will be listening to phrases for the next couple of weeks just to get my ears acclimated to Italian and not fracture simple hellos, thanks and the like too badly. Thanks for the tips.

If this application requires the internet to make a translation, I can see how that would become frustrating. Sure, it can save translations, but that means you have to anticipate what you want to say. I don't always know these things in advance :)

Allora, for a non-internet based iPod application I prefer the WordRoll series of language applications. They are not the most complete dictionaries ever, but they have come in handy on many occassions!

Just don't get your hopes very high. I took two of the sentences from your posting, ran them through Babelfish into Italian and then back into English. Here's what came out:

Once you' the VE made the translation, optionally law to high voice the words through l' loudspeaker of the device, in what' s apparently an accent born them. You can conserve the translations that fairies, for easy riutilizzazione and you can send them with the e-mail to others.

Translation engines always crack me up. :-)

Despite the obvious drawbacks of translation programs, they usually help out exactly when you need it for road signs, caution notices, etc. Obviously you are not going to sit around translating every word in a conversation with someone, so these things do have a great deal of use should you want to use them - just do not try and hold up a conversation with one.

That being said, I will recount a famous story told to computer science students about the drawbacks of creating the holy grail of a solid language-conversion program. One of the earliest attempts was to create a program to translate between English and Russian to facility easy communications during the later years of the cold war. There quickly were problems discovered with the program when someone translated "Out of sight, out of mind" into Russian and then back into English. The returned result was "Invisible idiot".