Google has just released Google Translate for iPhone users thanks to Allen Hutchison, an engineering manager at Google who developed the iPhone web app during his "20-percent time" that Google gives their Engineers so that they're free to work on what they're really passionate about.
You can checkout the details on Google's iPhone app after the jump.
Google Translate for iPhone has been optimized for speed, supports Google Translate language pairs and works almost exactly like the Desktop version.
All you need to do is type in a word or phrase, select the language you wish to translate it to and tap "Translate".
The cool feature of the iPhone web app is it uses a client-side data-store on the iPhone to store your past translations so you can always have them available for future reference even without a data connection.
Hutchison has developed the app using AJAX Language API so that the languages are automatically added whenever Google Translate team updates the languages they support.
Since you are most likely to use this application when you are abroad and might be worried about the data costs, Hutchison gives an approximate estimate on the data costs that he incurred on a trip abroad:
"I tried an early version of this interface out on my trip and it was great -- although my pronunciation wasn't. So every now and then, I would just hold up my phone to let people read what I couldn't. If you're wondering about data costs, I found that I could get between 200 and 400 translations in 1MB of data download. Although we don't charge for this service, your carrier may charge for the data usage so be sure to know what your roaming rates are. For my plan, I found that I could translate 400 phrases for less than $10 when roaming internationally."
To try Google Translate for iPhone, point your iPhone's Safari browser to translate.google.com.
Google has already revamped their Homepage for iPhone and released Google Reader, Google Talk, Mobile Google Notebook, Google Docs for the iPhone.
We believe that if data costs are not a concern, Google has a winner here as Google Translate for iPhone gives you access to translation capabilities for 23 languages (and growing) and not to forget its very large database in comparison to those foreign language electronic dictionaries which have pre-selected phrases and limited languages.
Let us know your feedback on Google Translate for iPhone.
[via Google Mobile Blog]
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I tried it just now and it's pretty cool. I just wish they had Thai.
LOL that's not proper Spanish on the 1st and 3rd example. 1st one should be " puede usted llevar me" and the 3rd is really bad it should be "me puede dar un café grande"
Its nice that they bring it to the iPhone users as well but as someone already mentioned here, the translations they offer contain many times mistakes!
Its nice that they bring it to the iPhone users as well but as someone already mentioned here, the translations they offer contain many times mistakes!
As Nate has mentioned already, these translations are of poor quality. As a professional translator, I can say that these machine translations are very poor. However, with certain systems that are trained, common phrases etc are programmed into translation memory… a CAT (computer-aided translation) system works better. I'd like to see something like Trados or SDLX technology on the iPhone.