translation

Official Babylon translator app released for Windows Phone

Apps

By Daniel Rubino, Thursday, Feb 2, 2012 at 10:19 am

Babylon is a popular online translation service that is making its way over to the mobile world. Back in December, we mentioned that the company had taken advantage of Microsoft's Mobile Acceleration Week 2011 in Israel to build the popular language translator for Windows Phone. From the description at the time:

"As the leading name in text translation, it was only natural that Babylon would transition over to mobile devices. And so they did. Already available on iOS and Android, Babylon for Windows Phone allows you to translate any word, in any language, to the language of your choice, in real time. Of course, there is a lot more to the app including a currency converter, since presumably you will be using the app when traveling. The UI is super simplistic and hence very intuitive and does exactly what it is meant to do, how it is meant to do it."

That app is now live and while the service is very powerful it's not the best translator we've used, partially because it doesn't have direct sharing options (though you can copy paste) nor the ability to pronounce anything i.e. text-to-speech. That latter part irks us a bit as apps built off of Bing's Translator service can do this quite readily. Still, for direct translations of whole paragraphs, it's not too shabby and it is free meaning it is worth the download if you need such a service.

Pick up Babylon Translator here in the Marketplace. Check out Babylon's online translation here: http://translation.babylon.com/ Thanks, Hassan H., for the heads up

Lumia - Spanish for prostitute?

Windows Phone News

By George Ponder, Thursday, Oct 27, 2011 at 2:49 pm

The Nokia Lumia are well designed, sharp looking Windows Phones. With sleek curves and vibrant screens the Lumia 800 and 710 are head turners. But could Lumia's Spanish translation mean something else that might be a head turner?

Apparently, the term Lumia is the colloquial term for prostitute in Spanish. Much like "call girl" and "working girl" are colloquial terms in English.

Lumia isn't the only product name that may get lost in translation here lately. Remember Siri? The personal assistant Apple introduced with the iPhone 4S? It turns out the Japanese translation for Siri means "ass" or "buttocks".

The Nokia Lumia Windows Phones are impressive but does it matter that some Spanish customers may get a chuckle about having a "prostitute" in their pants pocket? It's gotta be better than iPhone users who speak to their "buttocks" for assistance.

Source: Cnet, Technolog Thanks goes out to Jacob for tipping us on this!

Tweet Translator 1.0 headed to Marketplace

Windows Phone News

By George Ponder, Monday, Feb 14, 2011 at 2:30 am

Carmelo Milian, developer of the Windows Phone 7 application SoundEscape 7, is bringing an interesting Twitter app to the Marketplace. Tweet Translator promises to translate your tweets from or to a wide range of languages.

Other features of Tweet Translator include:

View your personal tweet time-line
Search people tweets
View public tweets
Hear the tweet with text to speech for various languages
Real-time translation for more than thirty languages

Languages covered in Tweet Translator range from Arabic to Haitian Creole to Vietnamese, as well as the customary French, Italian, Spanish, German and English. It will be interesting to see how well the text to speech feature of Tweet Translator will shake out.

According to the developer Tweet Translator has been submitted for certification and should be available at the Marketplace soon for $.99.

Translator - Review

Apps

By George Ponder, Wednesday, Dec 1, 2010 at 2:40 pm

Need a simple, straight forward translation application? It doesn't get any simpler than Translator from Microsoft.

The Windows Phone 7 application will translate words and phrases to and from English, Italian, Spanish, German and French. Translator will also provide you with a list of commonly used phrases that can be translated to the various languages.

The interface is straight forward and simple. The "from" and "to" languages are shown above two text entry fields. To change the languages, simply tap the language and choose the desired language from the list. If you want to reverse the translation order, tap the "swap button" at the bottom of the screen.

Microsoft shows off some WP7 mini-apps; Bing translator on board!

By Daniel Rubino, Thursday, Aug 5, 2010 at 11:10 am

On Microsoft's own Channel 9 yesterday, they showed off some of the free apps in the new Marketplace for Windows Phone 7.

Now these are hardly "killer" apps, in fact they are more demo apps with the source-code available for developers to build off of and incorporate into their own programs.

The programs demoed were pretty basic, much like the ones you find on Samsung phones:

Bubble/Spirit Level
Unit Converter
Shopping list
Weather
Stocks
2D game based on SilverLight: 'Unite'
Translator

The 2D game 'Unite' was kind of neat--it's just meant as brief time killer and is similar to 'Teeter' from HTC except instead of getting the ball in the hole, you need to combine two or more balls. Looks kind of fun actually.

But the real big thing was the demonstration of Bing Translator, which seems to be an expansion of this new service shown off back in May. Basically, you type in what you want to say and it will translate it for you in text; hit the speaker button and it will speak the phrase for you, even with an authentic accent.

The service is a hybrid one: it uses your data connection for new phrases, but stores old ones on the device. This will enable quick playback of phrases without having to constantly reach into the cloud (Android is 100% cloud based with translation, making Microsoft's solution more preferable). The app also already comes with an impressive list of canned phrases which you can quickly access and supports five-languages on launch:

French
German
Italian
Spanish
English

What's neat is like the other apps, Microsoft is making the source-code of this program available to developers, meaning anyone can incorporate and expand upon what they've already offered. This combined with their emphasis on voice could potentially give Android a run for their money (and leave Apple far behind).

Check out the video after the break. It's only 18 minutes of your time.