Mobile Google Translate for the iPhone

by Jody Mitoma on August 9, 2008 at 5:11 pm

Google now features mobile web pages for “Docs”, “News”, “Talk”, “Photos”, and the brand spankin’ new “Translate” thanks to Google developers David Singleton and Allen Hutchison.

Allen Hutchison explains how it came to be:

A few months ago I was planning a vacation to Austria and Italy. I knew a few words and phrases in German and Italian, but that was about it. So I looked around for some portable language dictionaries. I thought Google Translate was great, but the web pages didn’t work that well on the iPhone. So I teamed up with David Singleton, a fellow engineer in our London office, to build an iPhone interface for Google Translate.

David and Allen made this possible using only the 20% of work time that the company requires them to spend on personal projects.

The new web application supports all of the same languages as the desktop version because it is using the same AJAX Language API as its older brother. Not only so, but it also holds on to your previous translations in a list stored locally so that you can access the even when you’re without an internet connection.

If you’re wondering about data costs, I found that I could get between 200 and 400 translations in 1MB of data download. Although we don’t charge for this service, your carrier may charge for the data usage so be sure to know what your roaming rates are. For my plan, I found that I could translate 400 phrases for less than $10 when roaming internationally.

The mobile Google Translate page is exactly as the desktop version of the page, except it better fits the screen and is easier to use on your iPhone (or other mobile device).

You can access Google Translator for iPhone by visiting Google.com in your iPhone’s web browser and selecting the “more” tab, or by going directly to translate.google.com.

(via iPhone Alley)

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