Translator with Voice

It takes a little time to figure out how the app works, but I like it a lot! It has many more languages than shown on iTunes: English, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Dutch, Chinese. It also has Korean, Japanese, Russian, Afrikaans, Albanian, Arabic, Belarusian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Estonian, Tagalog, Finish, Galician, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Maltese, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Swahili, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukranian, Vietnamese, Welsh, and Yiddish! You choose the input language and the language into which you want your spoken words or written text translated. The original text is displayed (even if you spoke the words) and the translation appears in the alphabet of the selected language. When you press the arrow, you hear the words spoken in the translated language. You can keep the same input and translate it into any of the other languages. Some of the languages are spoken too fast even if you put the "speed" arrow on the slowest level, but others (like Portuguese) are spoken at an appropriate speed. It would be better if the volume were louder, but it's generally acceptable. All the translations I tested in Spanish, French, Portuguese, Korean, and Chinese seemed accurate. The interesting thing is that if 2 people who spoke different languages both had this app on their iPhones or iPads, they could communicate rather easily! For example, if I were speaking to someone who doesn't know English but speaks Greek, I could speak or write English and have the app say it and display my words in Greek. Then, the other person could answer in Greek and have his/her iPhone app answer in spoken and written English! The conversation would be a bit torturous, but possible!

This is really a zero star program. I've tried to get a credit for this purchase, because it is useless if you understand even a little of any of the languages translated. Some of the translations are laughable and would make you the laughing stock of any interlocutor you play the audio file to. Unfortunately, iTunes sends me to the Alterme site to cancel, and there's nothing that can be done at that site. This makes me very uncomfortable with iTunes and it will be a long time before I ever buy anything else from iTunes again.

I was excited to see this language-barrier busting app - what a concept, this could be, if perfected, the ultimate travel companion and yes, even a "killer app". It is clearly in the evolution phase but the foundation is good. Here's what it needs to be perfect: 1) better, more authentic phrasing with the spoken voice (what you have so far is a "good start") 2) the ability, similar to snap-tell, to take a photo of a travel or road sign and have it translated after selecting the source language. 3) the ability to select a source language, have a native speaker speak into the iphone, then send the file off to your servers for a translation. 4) a button on the main menu to quicky switch the source and target language (to facilitate #2 and #3). 5) a menu of commonly used travel phrases that can be quickly selected, so I dont have to type out "where is the restroom?" each time.