It’s only two weeks to go until I disappear off to France for a few days. As the closing weekend of the Olympics hit I’ll be staring at the TV screen in a villa near Nantes, often shouting and pleading with the British athletes to win. I’ll probably also get dumped for ignoring my fiancee.
Having been dumped I’ll probably also find myself in a French bar practicing my exceptionally poor language skills and wishing I had an iPhone to help me chat up the ladies.
I possibly should have mentioned that the iPhone now has a new phrasebook app. According to its creator writing Google’s mobile blog:
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 page 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.
If you’re one of the few people I truly envy, that both own an iPhone and have flown to Beijing for the Olympics then you’ll be pleased to know the app supports Chinese. This will help you get by until you realise that everyone else you know hates you.
It also seems it works off line too, cacheing all past translations so they’re available to browse and thereby reducing the amount of data downloaded each time.
But, if you’re already out of your own country, or don’t get free data on your package, do check the cost of roaming data.
