A virtual phrasebook for globetrotters

Quick, how do you ask for coffee with milk in Dutch? What’s the Chinese word for subway? How do you order a taxicab in Polish? If your travel destinations mean you’ll need answers to all those questions and more, the 12-Language Global Translator from Franklin Electronic Publishers (http://www.franklin.com/) is worth looking into. According to the publisher, the unit can translate more than 400,000 words and 12,000 phrases in 12 languages. This includes nine European languages (Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish) plus three Asian languages (Chinese, Japanese and Korean). For the Asian languages, the translation is given in the relevant language characters, but also phonetically using roman characters. For example, looking up the Korean translation for “street map” displays Korean characters as well as the word “sikato.” At 77 x 122 x 18 mm (3 x 4.75 x 0.75 inches), the US$99.95 device is about the same size as those paperback phrase books you might find in a bookstore. That makes it easy to tuck away in your pocket or handbag. The unit’s hard plastic shell is even styled to look like a little hardcover book, and being digital, the single Global Translator handles the translation duties for a dozen different languages. When open, the translator could easily be mistaken for a digital organizer. It’s a basic clamshell design with a qwerty keyboard and a character-based monochrome screen connected by a hinge. The screen is very simple, almost primitive, being neither backlit nor graphical. However, that keeps power requirements low, so the unit runs off a single CR2032 button battery - and besides, for word translation, all you need to display is text. And even though the screen isn’t backlit, the large characters are easy to see even in very dim light. As you might expect given the dimensions of the unit, the keyboard is also quite small, but the top row of alphanumeric keys is curved upward and the third row is curved downward, giving a bit more key spacing. Being a Blackberry user, it just seems natural to me to cradle the device in two hands and type using my thumbs, but you could also hold the unit in one hand and type with the other – or lay it on a table and use a modified touch typing style. Seven function buttons along the top of the keyboard give one-button access to common functions, such as source language, target language and phrase book. Most often, you’ll set the source language to your native language (e.g., English) and the target language to the language spoken in the country you are visiting. Then you type in a word or phrase in English and the translator returns the equivalent in the target language. However, you could also set it up the opposite way, so that you could type in foreign words you might encounter, with the translator displaying what they mean in English. The phrase book is organized into 12 topical categories (e.g., emergencies, shopping, dining, weather), plus a “general” category. There are many phrases arranged alphabetically, but you can type in a letter to take you to that section of the phrase book – for example, if you want to know how to say “How much does this cost?” you type the letter “h” and the system navigates to all the phrases beginning with “h.” However, it is sometimes quicker to type in a key word in the main translator window. Using the above example, I typed in the single word “cost” and the translator returned five hits, including the phrase I wanted: “How much does this cost?” Often, in fact, less is more. I typed in the words “gift store” and the machine returned a message “sorry, can’t help.” Then I tried just the word “gift” and the machine returned six hits, including the phrase “gift shop,” which is what I wanted. Franklin offers a similarly-styled unit that has just European languages for about half the price. It also recently introduced a speaking version of the global translator – same 12 languages, but with pre-recorded audio files onboard that allow you to hear the translated words and phrases spoken by a human speaker, which is listed on its website for US$299.95.