Review: Voice Translate Pro
Score:
75%
Writing a comprehensive language translation application is a lot easier when someone else is doing all the heavy lifting for you - as is the case with the new genre of translation applications which piggy back on the Google Translate API. For us, the users, it doesn't really matter whose servers are doing the work, mind you. In this case we have a simple and functional interface - all that's needed is a modest mobile Internet connection and you're away.
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The idea, as with other utilities in the past, is to gather what you want translated and which language you want it translated into and then fire this information at Google's servers. These then, hopefully, return the translated text and there's often an option to download an audio version too, useful for playing back to a native in a foreign land.
Voice Translate Pro, despite the name, is a free utility that does exactly this. It's built on Qt and requires Symbian^3 and upwards, possibly for performance reasons. The interface is simplicity itself, just tap on the two pick lists at the top of the screen and select your source and destination languages. One is usually your mother tongue, but it doesn't have to be, should you feel the overwhelming desire to translate from Galician to Slovak....
Tapping on 'Translate' initiates a connection to Google, around 30kb of data is exchanged for the lookup - surprisingly large for a simple text lookup - most of this is almost certainly the download of the next in-app advert (see below), but not a huge amount in the grand scheme of things, i.e. far less than grabbing a typical web page. The finished text translation appears in a second or so, assuming your connection is of decent speed.
Foreign accents appear correctly with only a few exceptions. As shown in the screenshot (middle) below, apostrophes sometimes fall foul of some character encoding glitch, this should have been picked up by the developers, Fumbo. One to fix in the next version. The 'Say' button, as you might expect, asks Google's servers for an audio version of the translated phrase - this involves another 20kb or so of data (this time surprisingly small, considering that we're talking audio rather than text and considering that there's probably a new advert image to grab as well).
The audio versions were impressively authentic, created by Google's text-to-speech interface online, though of course it's all limited by the quality of the speaker in your phone, making many of the voices sound tinnier than they actually are. Unsurprisingly, if you type in foreign text and ask for a translation in English, you end up with text spoken with an American accent!
There are other minor glitches - there's no Chinese or Japanese (etc.), some languages don't have audio versions available and some apparently can't be converted from some source languages, but the vast majority of translation work is supported and you really can't beat the price point here.
The free nature of Voice Translate Pro is made possible by inneractive adverts, which you're free to click on if you fancy the ad's contents. Normally I'd check whether the app worked if data wasn't enabled, but by definition Voice Translate Pro needs to be online all the time anyway, so it's not an issue. Whether anyone other than Google should be making money from Google's own translation servers is another matter, of course - but apart from the small extra data burden there's no cost to us so it would be churlish to complain too much.
Worth keeping installed for your next trip abroad, at the very least!
Steve Litchfield, All About Symbian, 4 October 2011
Reviewed by Steve Litchfield at