Going Abroad? Try a Translation App

Ideally, if you are visiting a foreign country it would be nice if you were able to speak the language, and get by as well as you would in your own country, conversing naturally, and not coming up against any stumbling blocks. Clearly though, this is not always practical and if you haven’t been fortunate enough to learn the language of the country you are visiting you may need to search for a more convenient solution.

In this instance, you may well be in luck. Apple has just launched the iSpeak translator for its iPhone (and iPod Touch). In a nutshell, this allows the user to convert words and sentences from English to another language, and vice versa. The biggest problem for most people when attempting to speak another language is how to pronounce the words in a given language. Well, in this app you are able to type out your word or phrase and have your device translate it into another language and speak it aloud for you. Thus avoiding those awkward moments where you cannot pronounce something and cause yourself some embarrassment.

Additionally, the app is relatively low priced, usually at £1 or so. It does, however, focus almost exclusively on European languages, although the relative benefits or otherwise of this fall down to the individual user. Given this though Apple does plan to, inevitably, expand to other languages in due course.

This app will of course prove invaluable to those on holiday in Europe. It is often expressed by British tourists in Europe that in popular holiday destinations there is no need for them to learn any proportion of the language as the residents will be used to tourists and they will know enough for both parties to get by. But it doesn’t hurt for the tourist to go prepared and armed with the necessary equipment to converse in a helpful manner.

The software does have its faults, however. Ideally, one would like to able to speak to the device and have it convert this into the other language. Given the limitations of speech recognition software currently this may be a hope to far. These are all considerations for Apple to take in its future software development.