Hi Brian,
On a different topic, if you travel frequently to Latin America (or
elsewhere), you might be interested in the mPassport series of apps
that provide medical information for English speakers traveling
abroad. They provide information on emergency medical services --
locations and contact information for doctors, dentists, hospitals,
and pharmacies. Currently, all these apps are free. The information is
tied in to the GPS functions of your iPhone, so you can locate support
that is close to you. Now, even though the locations do not currently
match your travel destination (e.g. they currently cover Mexico City,
Lima, Buenos Aires, and Quito), there are some really useful
functions, one of them being the Medical Translations section. With
an internet connection, you can use the links to hear the phrases
pronounced. However, the rest of the app functions without requiring
an internet connection, so you can look up either medical phrases or
medical terms (either under English or Spanish listings) and also
search for terms under either language. You could simply switch
VoiceOver to Spanish to listen to the terms pronounced. And however
fluent you may be, your Spanish is probably not up to a detailed
discussion of medical conditions and symptoms! There's also a history
function so that you can look up questions or phrases and save them,
then access them easily when you need to. Even for countries where
Medical Translations are not available (either because the language is
English, as in London, or places like Tokyo where they don't have the
Japanese transcriptions) these guides are very useful because they
give drug equivalencies. That means that even if you don't have a
medical emergency and want access to a list of doctors, dentists, etc.
(many of whom are checked to speak English), you might want to use
this app to find an equvalent over the counter drug to buy at a
pharmacy, and to use the app to find out which pharmacies are near you
and what their hours are. The mPassport apps are available
internationally. You can read an old review of mine about the first
mPassport Paris and mPassport London apps:
http://www.mail-archive.com/macvisionaries%40googlegroups.com/msg17672.html
(Accessible traveler's medical apps for iPhone/iPod Touch: mPassport
Paris and mPassport London, free for limited time)
The main change from the original release is that they made the
medical translations section use the internet for the spoken phrases
in order to cut down on the app size, and the apps are now available
internationally. There are 26 of them available at present, covering
all parts of the world.
HTH. Cheers,
Esther
On Nov 8, 2010, at 15:42, Brian Miller wrote:
Hi Ester,
Thank you so much for this side-by-side-by-side review of the three
apps.
I really appreciate the effort you put into this.
I think you are right that I translate and I speak will likely suit
my needs
well. I am actually a fluent Spanish speaker, but sometimes there
are words
that elude me and it would be great to be able to fill in some gaps as
needed. I'm traveling to Bolivia this weekend, and was looking for
something that would do this. The only problem is that these
require an
internet connection, and I haven't decided if I want to try an
international
plan with AT&T right now, since they messed it up last time I tried
when I
was in Ecuador last month.
Thanks again,
Brian M
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Esther
Sent: Monday, November 08, 2010 6:29 PM
To: [email protected]; [email protected]
Subject: iPhone translation apps [was Re: English-Spanish
translation redux]
Hi Dean and Brian,
I haven't wanted to weigh in with a suggestion for a Spanish
translation
app, since I have only rudimentary knowledge of Spanish, but if you're
looking for a translation app that runs through Google Translate
(with all
the usual limitations and caveats about machine translation and the
need to
use this through an internet connection), I can certainly recommend
a more
accessible alternative, with more features, at least based on my
reading of
the description of iTranslate - Spanish from Bizmosis, Inc. I'll
describe
three apps:
iTranslate -- the universal translator (free, but $1.99 to buy a voice
through in-app purchase to have translations read out with text to
speech) by Sonico GmbH, iSpeak Spanish ($1.99) by FutureApps, and
Trippo
Voice Translator Plus (free for text-to-text translations, free trial
text-to-speech use for 14 days, extendable by in-app purchase;
$4.99 for permanent license) by Cellictica. All three are available
internationally, and probably one the first two would be best suited
for
Brian's translation needs. I'm going to cc this to the
Macvisionaries list,
since it may be of wider interest, even though this answer is
specific to
the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad.
<snip>
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