“How many roads must a man walk down before you can call him Amanda?” That was the moment I fell in love with the Lonely Planet Offline Translator. Probably not for the reason Lonely Planet would have hoped, though. But let’s start at the beginning.
The name of this app does a fairly good job of describing what it does. It’s a translator. It takes words you input and attempts to output the same meaning in another language. No surprises there. The app works offline, so no internet connection is required; this is one of its greatest features.
Input-wise, it uses voice-recognition technology, and accepts typed text. If using voice-recognition, the text of what the app thought you said is displayed with the translation, so you can see whether it’s translating what you actually want it to. For the translating, there are separate versions of the app available – at $5.49 each – for translating English to French, Japanese, Spanish and others. You can also translate German to Spanish.
The ability to do all of this offline is handy, especially when travelling. Having said that, neither the voice recognition nor translation occur instantaneously, so a lot of your conversation will be spent staring at the little grey spinning wheel, unless you want to stick to typing.
I tested the Mandarin version, as I had a native speaker on hand. The translation is accurate almost all of the time.
The problem is the speech-recognition; sometimes it’s frighteningly accurate, but it can also be un-cooperative.
Its strength lies in translating common phrases, the sort you would find in phrase books for travellers, which it handles satisfactorily as long as one takes care in enunciating clearly.
The Lonely Planet Offline Translator is great at performing basic tasks, but there are inaccuracies that make it inconsistent and frustrating at times.
iPhone/iPad
Lonely Planet Publications
$8.49
By Peter Roper
This article originally appeared in issue #3 of touch magazine.
Lonely Planet Offline Translator