French Translator Dictionary +

I am a US traveler. I have been traveling in France for two weeks. All day long I’ve been using Google Translate and Maps to help me with French and GPS directions. Google Translate and Maps requires an internet connection, which, on the all-day-long fly, requires data connection with roaming charges. After about 8 days of travel in France, I received a text message that I had reached my foreign data limit, so my service was instantly terminated. I couldn’t make any phone calls, no texts, no emails, absolutely no internet! When I finally reached (not easy task) Consumer Cellular, I found out I had already used $800 megabytes worth of roaming French data. So I was dead in the water in France. I quickly paid up so I could get French internet roaming service. WOW! French roaming charges are wicked expensive!! That’s when I discovered Translate + which does everything Google Translate does, BUT OFF LINE!!!!!!! I wish I had known T+ from the beginning! My only issue with T+: I cannot figure out how to slow down T+’s vocal output which helps me pronounce French words and phrases.

I was born in France and lived there until I was 5 years old. So my French is pretty good but I occasionally need to look up a word or two. I tried several apps and settled on this one. It is the only app I found that has modern vocabulary including acronyms like lol which is mdr, mort de rire in French. The developer regularly publishes blog articles with new vocabulary they add to the dictionary. I noticed they added menu items that you would find in a French restaurant and French idioms. For me, that’s the type of vocabulary that makes a difference, not just common vocabulary that you find in any dictionary. There are a few words I haven’t found, so I’m not saying it’s perfect, but even then you can do an online lookup in other resources like wiktionary which is really helpful. In this last version I noticed you can tap on the microphones in the search bar to do a voice lookup. Nice touch and makes things a bit faster to use. I also discovered that you can add your own stuff to the phrasebook. It already has a fair amount of sentences in it but I often pick up new ones when I travel in France and it’s really cool to be able to add them. And if you add sentences to the phrasebook, they appear in the dictionary too. Very slick. Another feature I appreciate is being able to limit flashcards to dictionary favorites. That way I can just study my own list of words instead of random words I already know. It took me a while to stumble across this feature. It’s in the settings icon on the flashcards screen. All in all this app gives great value for beginners and people with a good knowledge of French. Frequent updates make it better and better. Definitely worth it.

I have been using this app for a long time. I speak and teach French, and I find it very useful. There are so many things I like about it. The dictionary is quite exhaustive pronunciation is great, many verb conjugations, useful phrases and lots more. Following is an update to my old review. The developer not only fixed the problem that I wrote about below, but he has added lots more words. Everything works great now. Just tap any word or phrase and it will pronounce it for you. I highly recommend any app by Ascendo. Old review: This app is just wonderful, but recently it stopped pronouncing words. I contacted the developer, and they responded immediately. Apparently Google changed something without notifying them, and that caused the problem. This is how to fix this issue on an iPhone: Tap the speaker icon at the top right of any dictionary word screen and turn off the switch for "Use better quality online voices when available." Then make sure the volume is turned up and try again. This totally solved the problem.