Google Launches Google Translate for the iPhone

| 06-09-2008 | Translation | Written by Matthew Bennett

Using their famed Google 20% of free creative time, Allen Hutchinson and David Singleton designed the new interface when Hutchison decided he wasn’t happy with the available solutions whilst preparing for a holiday to Austria and Italy a few months ago.

Screenshot of Google Translate for the iPhone

The complication of visiting websites, especially Flash and Ajax based ones with a mobile browser makes things difficult for mobile web users so this optimised version for the iPhone should make it much easier for you.

Browsing Google Translate on your iPhone even lets you store your translations in its memory so you can access them when you’re not connected.

The exorbitant costs of roaming and data plans whilst you are abroad have already been highlighted as a potential obstacle for wider use of the system, though.

Hutchinson says in his blog post that he was able to download around 400 phrases for 10 USD with the plan he was on.

Apart from the usual derision of machine translated phrases, readers leaving comments on the Google blog announcement have already suggested that they extend the idea by:

• using the iPhone to take a photo of a foreign-language sign and then have it processed using OCR technology and translated automatically;
• having it present multiple translations for the same word;
• making your iPhone pronounce the translated phrase at you;

The service only supports 24 languages right now, which will annoy you if your favourites aren’t on the list.

You don’t need to download and install anything from the App Store, you just visit Google Translate on your iPhone and it works.