Mobile Translator is a sort of universal phrasebook that can translate words and short phrases between a variety of languages.
You are asked to choose a starting language from a choice of English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Russian, Portuguese, Dutch, Japanese, Korean and Chinese and then select the language you would like to translate into.
Type in your word or phrase and tap/click ‘Go’ and the app will try to translate it for you.
It’s pretty quick – less than a second for the (admittedly simple) phrases I tried. If I have one complaint it is that each language uses it’s own native character set. Not a problem with English, French, etc. but if you try to translate into Japanese you will find the results in Kanji. Similarly, to translate Japanese -> English would require you to enter your phrase in Kanji. Expect to do a lot of pointing if you try to use this abroad.
Although ostensibly an iPhone app, because it is basically just a web page you can use it on almost any mobile browse. I tried it on Opera Mini and it worked fine, although the list of languages was hidden behind one of those lists where you have to click on the plus sign to reveal the contents.
Caveats aside, Mobile Translator has the advantage of being completely free and can be found here.
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About Stuart Houghton
The app looks nice, but we need more language pairs. Like Bulgarian and so on.