myLanguage Pro

I'm a wanted criminal in 9 states, so I recently fled the U.S. to go into hiding in Seoul, Korea. Granted, my criminal activites are entirely limited to parking tickets and I probably didn't need to flee across the Pacific, but I moved to Korea anyway! I've been living here for about two months now and it's awesome except for those pesky 20 times a day when I'm shrugging my shoulders at people I'm trying to talk with because my ability to speak Korean is about on par with an average two year old.

Swain reviewed the free version of myLanguage nearly a year ago and was impressed, and now that I personally have a need for this kind of app I decided to take the Pro version for a spin to see if it's something that I could really use on a daily basis.

First thing to keep in mind here is that I'm only looking at myLanguage Pro's Korean translations because that's the only non-English language that I'm even remotely familiar with. If you're not Korean, fear not... this app supports a ton of languages... 55 to be exact, covering everything from Afrikaans to Maltese to Yiddish. The more widely used tongues, such as English, French, German, Spanish, and even Icelandic, come with spoken voice translations in case you want to hear your translation out loud.

As Swain pointed out a year ago, this app comes with all kinds of bells and whistles that include a searchable translation history, the ability to rate translations and suggest more accurate wording, transliteration (phonetic sounding-out of foreign words), and the ability to enlarge text so you can show it to the shopkeeper who's about to rip you off.

But what about the translations themselves? Are they any good? Well... yeah they're pretty good! And in comparison to similar apps they could very well be Best of Class. I can't really say how this app compares to its competition because I honestly haven't tried the competition (yet), but one thing I can say for sure is that it's highly unlikely that any iPhone app is going to spit out translations that sound like they just rolled off a native tongue. Language is a very subjective thing and even the best engineer's coding magic generally won't be very good at mimicking that.

The reason I say the translations are just "pretty good" is that they get the general message across but the language overall tends to sound pretty FOB-y in comparison to more natural language patterns (FOB = Fresh Off the Boat), and some of the straight-up vocabulary translations are no more than phonetic "transliterations", such as money being translated as "mun-ee" (the Korean word is "don", rhymes with "tone"). Another example where the translation could be better can be seen in the screenshots below where "here" and "there" aren't interpreted quite right. Again, though, the general message gets conveyed and, in real-life scenarios, the context of the situation will be enough to fill in the blanks. Plus, if you know the target language well enough, you can submit a suggestion to correct the app's translation and hopefully help it provide progressively better results.

As with any app or gadget that's meant for bridging language gaps, the quality of translations is a pretty huge deal and myLanguage Pro is far from perfect but it's still good at what it does and, provided you have some kind of network connection, it should make communicating in a strange land a lot easier. The extra functions, especially the searchable translation history, are a great bonus as well.

iTunes Link - myLanguage Pro
Version 1.3
Reviewed on iPhone 3G OS3.1