With more language translation applications becoming available on mobile phones, business travelers can now rely on their handsets instead of translation guides when they visit a foreign country, said mobile manufacturers.
Nelson Wee, Southeast Asia-Pacific marketing manager at Nokia, said business travelers are “always connected via their mobile phones” so having a mobile application that facilitates language translation ensures these travelers will not be “handicapped”–even without a translator–when they are in a foreign land.
Language translation tools enables multilingual translation in the form of text, e-mail, short message service (SMS), instant messaging (IM), speech, as well as in chatroom environments. This enables business travelers to communicate more effectively anywhere in the world, with the help of a portable translator that fits right in the palm of their hands.
Similar to Web-based translation portals, mobile translation applications offer a number of useful features, including speech generation–where text is converted into human speech rendered in the voice of a native speaker of the target language–and also speech recognition, where users can record voice clips and translate them into audio clips or text.
RIM and Nokia have highlighted a new method of translation that some applications have incorporated–translation of text from pictures.
Interlecta Translator for RIM’s BlackBerry, for example, supports this feature. The software tool allows users to take a picture containing text such as a road sign or food menu, with their mobile device, extract the text using optical character recognition (OCR) technology and translate it into the desired language.
How cool is that!
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