Google has released a Google Translate app for the iPhone that includes a feature that allows you to speak in one language and have the app translate your words into another. I was curious to see how well this worked, so I spent a little bit of time yesterday testing the app. Here’s what I found:
- The app works well for very short phrases. For anything longer than a few seconds, however, more often than not you either get gibberish or an error message.
- Perhaps not surprisingly, the speech-to-translate feature works great if you’re speaking English. The app picked up every English phrase I said perfectly.
- I don’t really speak any other Romance or Germanic languages, so I can’t vouch for how well the app picks up those. I can, however, vouch for the app’s ability to pick up the first line of “Ode to Joy” in German, whether spoken or sung (the remnants of my four-and-a-half years of German classes in high school and college). As for the several other lines of broken and, I’m sure, poorly accented German I threw at the app, the performance was so-so.
- The real test was how the app performs for a language that’s completely different from English in terms of syntax, pronunciation, and grammar — in this case, Mandarin. I spoke to the app in Mandarin for about 10 minutes, asking and answering various everyday questions. The outcome was very mixed — the translations were surprisingly good for some phrases, but laughably horrible for others (though I must admit that it’s amazing the app picked up as much Mandarin as it did). For instance, when I asked, “What year were you born in?” in Mandarin, the app thought I was asking, “What year did you die in?” because the particular Mandarin phrase I used for “born” sounds somewhat similar to a phrase for “die”.
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