Hi Ester, Thank you so much for this side-by-side-by-side review of the three apps. I really appreciate the effort you put into this.
I think you are right that I translate and I speak will likely suit my needs well. I am actually a fluent Spanish speaker, but sometimes there are words that elude me and it would be great to be able to fill in some gaps as needed. I'm traveling to Bolivia this weekend, and was looking for something that would do this. The only problem is that these require an internet connection, and I haven't decided if I want to try an international plan with AT&T right now, since they messed it up last time I tried when I was in Ecuador last month. Thanks again, Brian M -----Original Message----- From: macvisionaries@googlegroups.com [mailto:macvisionar...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Esther Sent: Monday, November 08, 2010 6:29 PM To: viph...@googlegroups.com; macvisionaries@googlegroups.com Subject: iPhone translation apps [was Re: English-Spanish translation redux] 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 > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. 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