translator

Web-based Twitter client Brizzly made a dual announcement Friday: first, it's opened up into a full public beta mode (previously, an invite code was required); and second, it can now translate tweets into your default language on the site.

To translate a tweet in Brizzly--which already expands links, videos, and photos posted to Twitter, creating a more visual experience--you can click on a question mark for an instant translation. This is interesting, as Twitter has made its first moves recently in launching translated versions of the service (starting with Spanish), meaning that there will potentially be many more non-English … Read more

Just like everyone who grew up on something of a "Star Trek" diet, I want to believe.

I want to believe that Spock will rise from the dead, get married, and have pointy-eared offspring, who, regressing to the mean, will become sports-loving couch potatoes. I want to believe that Captain Kirk will shack up with Uhura on Pluto and lead a fight to have the planet recognized as one of the greats.

And I want to believe that d'Armond Speers really did only speak to his son in Klingon for the first three years of the little boy's life.

You don't remember d'Armond? Well, he first entered the Trekkie firmament in a 1999 Wired article, in which he told of how difficult it had been to communicate solely in the limited language of Klingon with his then 30-month-old son, Alec.

He even presented a recording of little Alec singing the opening bars of the Klingon Imperial Anthem.

The story has this week been updated with some extraordinary news.… Read more

Occasionally we come across a program that has the potential to be really great but is ruined by a terrible interface. LEC Translate DotNet is one such program. This suite of translation utilities allows users multiple ways to translate text on their computers, but the way the program is laid out makes it utterly frustrating to use.

The program is composed of five different utilities, ClipTrans, FileTrans, LogoTrans, and MirrorTrans. Do you have any idea what any of these do? Neither did we. And opening each one revealed interfaces with absolutely no direction. The only way to figure out what … Read more

Google made several improvements to Google Translate Monday, such as the ability to translate words written with unique character sets with their phonetic spelling.

Google has been steadily adding languages to Google Translate over the last couple of years, but if the language used a completely unfamiliar character set--such as the Roman-character based languages like English or Spanish versus Chinese characters--the service was only useful for those trying to write in the language. Now Google Translate will help those trying to translate English into Chinese for speaking purposes by providing a phonetic version of the translation in Roman characters.

Those … Read more

Cute Translator lets users translate text between 13 different languages. Although the program does translate text quickly, we found the program's other features frustrating and, in some cases, unusable.

We were met right off the bat with two nonsensical error messages when the program opened. We ignored them, and the program opened without issues. The interface is simple enough, with a box for users to input text and another below it where the translation appears. Translations are completed quickly. The program's extra features, however, are annoying to set up. Users can have text read aloud to them by … Read more

My Translator is purportedly a translation program that lets users translate words between several languages. Unfortunately, the program's design and some outright errors make it a poor choice for this kind of work.

The program's interface is basic and easy enough to understand. Select the languages that you're translating from and to, enter the original text in the input box, and the results show up in the output box. That part is simple enough. The problems occur when you start to consider the program's features and content. First of all, unlike many other translation programs and … Read more

In the classic Simpsons episode "Brother, Can You Spare Two Dimes?", Homer's long-lost brother Herb invents a baby translator. The baby cries, the machine announces its meaning (in Danny DeVito's inimitable voice) in plain English.

Seventeen years later, there's an app for that. Cry Translator promises to identify the "five distinct cries" made by infants.

In other words, you no longer have to wonder if your ankle-biter is tired, hungry, mad, stressed, or just bored. It's like Stanza for crybabies.

My first reaction: That's cheating! My second reaction: Why wasn't … Read more

So how do you say "fail whale" en español? Twitter has launched a Spanish translation, according to a blog post Tuesday (in Spanish) by co-founder Biz Stone.

It's the first of multiple volunteer-assisted translations for the microblogging site, the post explained. A look at Twitter's public timeline will show that it's used in many languages across the world, but until this point, the Twitter.com site has been English only. Now, users can go into their settings to translate it into Spanish.

This could be key as Twitter attempts to grow bigger overseas … Read more

MultiTranse is a simple utility for translating languages. The program impressed us with its speed and accuracy, but it left us wanting just a little more than it provided.

The program's interface was a delight. Not only was the layout intuitive, with its smartly designed command icons, but also it's helpful. A pop-up tip screen walked us through our first translation, completely eliminating any need to seek instruction from the Help file. You simply enter a primary phrase in any of the 24 languages MultiTranse handles--we chose English--and select one of the national flags representing the language you … Read more