Google Translate now fitted for iPhone
Google announced on Thursday that it has developed version of its Google Translate web service that's designed specifically for iPhone and iPod touch users.
"Google Translate for iPhone is optimized for speed, supports all of the existing Google Translate language pairs, and uses a client-side data-store on your iPhone to hang on to your past translations so you always have them at hand, even if you can't use the local data network," the company said on its mobile blog. "We wrote this using the AJAX Language API, so every time the Google Translate team updates the languages they support, the languages will automatically be added here."
Google software engineer Allen Hutchison recently took the new web app for a test run as part of a recent trip to Spain. He found that he could perform between 200 and 400 translations before exceeding 1MB of data download, which cost him less than $10 on his international roaming plan for the iPhone.
The Google Translate service itself is free. iPhone and iPod touch users can access the web app by going to www.google.com and choosing the "more" tab, or by typing translate.google.com directly.
"Google Translate for iPhone is optimized for speed, supports all of the existing Google Translate language pairs, and uses a client-side data-store on your iPhone to hang on to your past translations so you always have them at hand, even if you can't use the local data network," the company said on its mobile blog. "We wrote this using the AJAX Language API, so every time the Google Translate team updates the languages they support, the languages will automatically be added here."
Google software engineer Allen Hutchison recently took the new web app for a test run as part of a recent trip to Spain. He found that he could perform between 200 and 400 translations before exceeding 1MB of data download, which cost him less than $10 on his international roaming plan for the iPhone.
The Google Translate service itself is free. iPhone and iPod touch users can access the web app by going to www.google.com and choosing the "more" tab, or by typing translate.google.com directly.
Comments
The first one has a grammatical error, since there is no such thing as "a el" - it should be "al".
The third one is more understandable, but still wrong. It is a literal translation, which is why it's forgivable for a program. But the result makes no sense in Spanish - you wouldn't ask someone if you are literally able to possess a large coffee. Instead, you would simply say something more like "I would like" a large coffee (or perhaps using the conditional "Podri'a tener" would be correct as well).
Certainly these translators can never be perfect, but the first error is unforgivable to me, and in any case, from a marketing standpoint, they should have picked perfect translations for this.
I like how 2 of the 3 translations are wrong.
The first one has a grammatical error, since there is no such thing as "a el" - it should be "al".
More glaring, to me, is the lack of subject verb agreement. The verb is plural while the subject is singular. Just another deficiency of computer translations... The original "you" in the English version can be either singular or plural, but in Spanish it matters!
The third one is more understandable, but still wrong. It is a literal translation, which is why it's forgivable for a program. But the result makes no sense in Spanish - you wouldn't ask someone if you are literally able to possess a large coffee. Instead, you would simply say something more like "I would like" a large coffee (or perhaps using the conditional "Podri'a tener" would be correct as well).
Yeah. And "gran cafe" is awkward as well.
Certainly these translators can never be perfect, but the first error is unforgivable to me, and in any case, from a marketing standpoint, they should have picked perfect translations for this.
Well, I don't think that this was a marketing shot--I think the person who wrote the article is showing a few test translations. Who knows, maybe they picked translations it struggled with on purpose...