Hi Dean and Brian,
I haven't wanted to weigh in with a suggestion for a Spanish
translation app, since I have only rudimentary knowledge of Spanish,
but if you're looking for a translation app that runs through Google
Translate (with all the usual limitations and caveats about machine
translation and the need to use this through an internet connection),
I can certainly recommend a more accessible alternative, with more
features, at least based on my reading of the description of
iTranslate - Spanish from Bizmosis, Inc. I'll describe three apps:
iTranslate -- the universal translator (free, but $1.99 to buy a voice
through in-app purchase to have translations read out with text to
speech) by Sonico GmbH, iSpeak Spanish ($1.99) by FutureApps, and
Trippo Voice Translator Plus (free for text-to-text translations, free
trial text-to-speech use for 14 days, extendable by in-app purchase;
$4.99 for permanent license) by Cellictica. All three are available
internationally, and probably one the first two would be best suited
for Brian's translation needs. I'm going to cc this to the
Macvisionaries list, since it may be of wider interest, even though
this answer is specific to the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad.
• iTranslate -- the universal translator by Sonico GmbH
For a general purpose app based on Google Translate, I'd recommend
iTranslate -- the universal translator by Sonico GmbH. It does
require an internet connection to use, and it's for text based input
and translated output, however you can purchase a Loquendo voice for
text to speech for $1.99 to read out your translated text. These
voices are very good quality. The iTranslate app itself is free, and
it can handle translations in 52 languages with voice options to
support text to speech in 17 languages. There are 3 Castilian Spanish
voices (1 male, 2 female) and 2 American Spanish voices (1 male, 1
female) to choose from. You don't have to turn VoiceOver off at any
point to access the text boxes. If you want to listen to the text to
speech version and you have purchased a voice, you just flick right to
the "IMG speaker touch" button that follows the text box for the
translated field. (I usually mute VoiceOver with a three finger
double tap after I've flicked to the button, and just before I double
tap that button so that it's announcement doesn't obscure the
beginning of the translated speech, then I unmute with another three
finger double tap). If you want to mail, text message, or tweet the
translated text, or to save it to history (if you purchased the "plus"
version upgrade for $0.99 that allows you save a history of your
translation inputs and outputs), you just flick right again to the
"IMG action touch" button and double tap. A menu comes up with options
for Save (with the plus version of the app), Email, SMS, Twitter, and
Copy. If you double tap "Email", for example, the translated text is
included in the body of an Email message. I would recommend that you
get iTranslate Plus version of the app for $0.99, which will keep a
history of your recent translations and also allow you save and
organize your translations into favorites lists by categories that you
can customize. If you want to start by getting the free version of
the app, you can upgrade to the iTranslate Plus version by in-app
purchase. However, if you ever need to restore the app on your
device, you're going to have to remember to get the free app and
update it by in-app purchase. If it were me, I would simply buy the
iTranslate Plus version (for $0.99) directly -- even if I first tried
out the free version of the app, so as not to get charged again if you
end up trying to restore the paid version. If you have the "plus"
option, if you flick right past the "IMG action touch" button you'll
reach the "Favorites" button in the bottom left corner. This allows
you to access your history and the favorites you saved. Finally,
there is an "Info" button in the bottom right corner that lets you
access your Add-ons and Settings. For example, you can control the
voice rate with a slider from the "Voices" setting, determine whether
you want Auto Correction or Auto Capitalization set on or off for your
text entries under the "Keyboard" setting, and increase the Font size
of the input text (if you are a low vision user) in the "Font Size"
setting. The "Text-to-Speech" entry under Add-ons lets you browse
samples of all the voices available for in-app purchase. Otherwise,
if you simply double tap the "IMG speaker touch" button beside your
translated text and you haven't purchased a voice, you'll be shown a
menu of sample voices for that language. The button won't appear for
languages without a supported voice. I gave a full description of the
layout of all controls on the iTranslate Plus screen in my archived
list post "Chinese Input with VoiceOver on the iPhone" (paragraphs 3
through 5):
http://www.mail-archive.com/macvisionaries%40googlegroups.com/msg24706.html
In this older version of the app, Chinese voices weren't available;
they are now. Another feature addition in the latest version of this
app is "swipe to paste". I've actually used this, and it's kind of
neat. This is a standard gesture, so if you have copied text from
some other app to be translated, and you have toggled VoiceOver off,
you can just swipe your finger to the right in the top half of the
iTranslate screen to paste into a blank text box, and when you toggle
VoiceOver back on, the text (and its translation) will appear in the
text boxes. In general, this is the app that I've found to have the
most different language options with good quality supported text-to-
speech voices for languages. And for some languages, like Russian,
they offer male voices that aren't available in other apps that
support that language. It's very accessible, allows you to control
the speaking rate options, has a range of features for saving and
emailing the translations, and is reasonably priced for the features.
For iPad users, there is a very nice, recent, free (ad-supported)
version of the app called iTranslate for iPad. This has built-in
voices for English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese,
Russian, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.
You don't get to select the voice, and it doesn't cover all the
languages with voices (in the regular iPhone app) that you can get,
but it's really nice to have these voice options built into the free
app. You also don't have the same range of options to text message,
tweet, or copy, but there's a button that lets you email your
translation. And you can always use the iPhone version of the app on
the iPad.
• iSpeak Spanish ($1.99) by FutureApps
I can't directly review iSpeak Spanish, but this is one of a series of
iSpeak translation apps that FutureApps offers using the Acapela
Group's Infovox voices for the text to speech. I use these voices on
my Mac, and they're very good. This app comes with a built in pair
of voices for each language, so you don't buy anything additional
through in-app purchase, and you get the English U.S. "Heather" voice
along with the voice for your specified language. There is only one
unlabeled button in the app, which is the Info button that lets you
set the iSpeak Options for the Voice volume and Voice speed sliders.
This button is at the top left corner of the app. Everything else in
the app is well-labeled and perfectly accessible. It has the same
basic layout as the iTranslate app, in that the top half of the screen
has the text box for the "translate from" language and the bottom half
of the screen has the text box for the "translate to" language. Like
the iTranslate app, you can switch the translate "from" and "to"
languages (and text) by double tapping a button at the far left side
of the screen, midway between the top and bottom translation "from"
and "to" halves of the screen. On the iTranslate screen this is
labeled "button switch lang". On the iSpeak screen this is just
labeled "swap". Only the text in the bottom half of the screen can be
spoken with text to speech (by double tapping the "Speak It!" button
in the bottom left corner). If you want to hear the "from" text
spoken with text to speech, you'll have to double tap the "swap"
button and then double tap the "Speak It!" button. With both the
iTranslate app and these apps, double tapping the button for text to
speech ("IMG speaker touch" or "Speak It!") starts or stops speech.
The iSpeak implementation is a little cleaner, since if you double tap
this button after VoiceOver has announced it, you don't get any
additional speech from VoiceOver. With the iTranslate app, after you
double tap the button for text to speech there is a brief overlap of
the repeated button's name with the start of the text. I don't
actually find the muting a problem; with iTranslate I touch the screen
(in the bottom translation text boxe), flick right to the speaker
control, do a three finger double tap to mute, then double tap to
start up the speech. If I want to stop midway, I double tap again.
(The button still has focus). If I want to unmute speech, I do a
three finger double tap to unmute. However, you might find it simpler
to locate the "Speak It!" button in the bottom left corner of the
screen.
The iSpeak apps also let you save or email the translation. Flick
right from the "Speak It!" button in the bottom left corner of the
screen to the "Action" button and double tap. You'll find options to
"Save translation" or "Email translation". One nice feature of this,
is that when you Email, both the original text and the translated text
get sent. (In iTranslate only the translated text is forwarded in
mail, text messages or tweets, although for saved entries you get
access to both versions). To access saved text, flick right from the
"Action" button to the "Saved" button in the bottom right corner. You
can search for matching terms in the search text box, and find
matching saved entries in the list under English to Spanish or Spanish
to English. If you double tap the listed item, you'll be taken back
to the iSpeak screen with both the original and translated text.
However, unlike iTranslate, you cannot group categories or favorites.
Also, one annoying feature that is particular to the iSpeak app used
on the iPad (still under OS 3.2.1 at this time), is that if you leave
the app, any contents you typed into the translation field are cleared
off, so if you didn't "save" the entry, you won't find be able to
bring up your input again. This doesn't seem to happen on the iPhone
or iPod Touch, so maybe it's due to OS 3.2.1 and the issue will go
away under iOS 4.2. However, this problem isn't present with
iTranslate. Also, iSpeak hits the translation word limit faster than
iTranslate does, although I think they both use Google Translate. (It
might be total number of characters, but I hit this with a document
that had 263 words in iSpeak.) Another annoyance with the iSpeak app
used on the iPad, if you hit this limit, the app informs you that
you've exceeded the limit, but doesn't exit nicely as it does on the
iPhone or iPod Touch. Instead, once you dismiss the warning, it tries
again to run the translation and goes into an endless loop that
requires you to exit the app. Of course, on the iPad if you haven't
saved a copy of the input text somewhere else, it's all lost. My
feeling is that this is likely to get sorted under iOS 4.2, either
with the release of the operating system or with a fix to the iSpeak
app.
I think that either of the above two apps would work as a translation
app for Brian. I'm using these apps mainly to get the language
functions working for my iPad until it finally gets the language rotor
working in iOS 4.2. So the translation apps are being pressed into
service for things like reading Russian and Chinese, and generating
the non-Roman text. I can paste in text excerpts much longer than can
be translated, and use the voice to speak the text. For actual
reading text in other languages on the iPad, I'm using the Speak It!
text to speech app ($1.99 includes 4 English voices; $0.99 for each
other language voice) by FutureApps. Here's a link to an old archived
post that describes Speak It!:
http://www.mail-archive.com/macvisionaries%40googlegroups.com/msg19914.html
Finally, I think that Dean might like to try Trippo Voice Translator
Plus by Cellictica. I'm not recommending this as Brian's translation
app, because I think the other two apps will be easier to use and
operate more robustly for his purposes. Trippo Voice Translator Plus
is a free version of the Trippo VoiceMagix app that I have. This app
can use speech recognition from the Nuance engine that Dragon
Dictation employs to input the text to be translated (you can also
type or paste this in), and it has built-in text to speech voices for
French, Spanish, German, Italian, Dutch, Greek, Portuguese, Polish,
Russian, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Japanese, Hindi, and
Thai. It also supports text to text translations in languages that the
iPhone does not. However, the speech recognition only works for
English as an input language. Originally it was only released for the
U.S. The present version works with a free 14-day trial (for the text-
to-speech use; the text-to-text translation works indefinitely). I
think you can purchase a permanent license for $4.99 and if you want
to use the speech recognition feature on a long-term basis that costs
$0.99 for an in-app purchase. It's not as smooth to use as these
other apps, and it requires an internet connection for the
translation, but it is using Cellictica's servers, I think. This is
not Google Translation. It's closer to the way that Jibiggo works,
but through a server connection and not bi-directional. The fields
are close to the way I originally described the app in the linked post:
http://www.mail-archive.com/macvisionaries%40googlegroups.com/msg23454.html
(Trippo VoiceMagix -- new speech recognition and translation app for
the iPhone)
But the screen has been slightly re-arranged. You can still double
tap the "BTN arrow show" button just above the home button to get
information about the "Help" (leftmost button) and the
"Settings" (rightmost button) -- where you can adjust voice rate and
default use configuration. Read down the thread of the archived
linked post for more details. Mac users can use Control+N to read the
next post in the thread. For other browsers, use the appropriate
access key for the shortcut (e.g. Alt+N for Internet Explorer; and Alt
+Shift+N for Firefox, I think). The main points for Trippo Voice
Translator Plus are the wealth of text-to-speech voices and its
coverage of languages (and scripts) not normally supported on the
iPhone, and the use of speech recognition for input. It also is truly
a different translation option that Google translate. On the other
hand, the interface is less polished because this is a relatively new
app. (This comment has nothing to do with accessibility, but more
with the user interface design. You can copy the text, but there are
no built in features to email, text message, tweet, or otherwise save,
etc.)
HTH. Sorry to get sketchy on the Trippo Voice Translator Plus
description, but I'm running out of steam, and a lot of this was
described in my older linked post. Cheers,
Esther
On Nov 7, 2010, at 16:11, Dean Martineau wrote:
As I mentioned in the thread regarding Jibbigo, I would avoid this
expensive app if your translation needs are at all serious. Here I
will describe ITranslate - Spanish from Bizmosis, Inc, which can be
used but has a few limitations.
When you want to input a translation, the edit field does not come
up. You have to turn VoiceOver off and tap in the lower half of the
screen, then turn it back on. this invariably works.
When the app translates a sentence, it closes, so you have to re-
open it.
the translation is not available in writing, only verbally. It is
desirable to use an external QWERTY or braille keyboard here, as then
you can easily turn speech off, then press the Hear Translation
button. Otherwise, VoiceOver speech obscures the beginning of the
translation as you try to silence it. the app supposedly will e-mail
your translations to a designated mailbox, but it never did so in my
tests.
this app requires an Internet connection. It may simply run the
sentence or phrase through the Google translation service, as in one
test, the results of it and Google were identical.
Brian Miller wrote:
Good evening all,
A week or so ago I asked for recommendations for a app that does
English-Spanish translation, and someone recommended Jibbigo. I
looked it
up and it indeed seems like an awesome app, but it is also $24.99.
While I
might pick this up sometime, this is a pretty penny as apps go.
Can anyone recommend something priced a little lower?
Thanks,
Brian Miller
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