Babel fish…is probably the oddest thing in the universe…it absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy… It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix… the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres… The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear, you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language.

Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Your iPhone/iPod touch has currently 168 apps (and counting) to help you out in alien language environments. Some of those are even “speaking apps”, where a nice female voice suavely speaks out “Would you like a drink?” in Spanish to your colleague in Madrid.  Does that make your iPhone a Babel Fish? Not yet. (Except “the oddest thing in the universe” part may be…)

We are not there. Not yet. However, your iPhone can certainly be an impressive polyglot, if you choose it to make so, among its many other exceptional and eccentric features.

The polyglot inside: The Virtual Keyboard:

The iPhone has a virtual keyboard. Big deal. It is. Specially if you consider that this keyboard seamlessly recognizes the scripts of the major languages around the globe.  For instance, its keyboard.  The iPhone’s touch screen takes advantage of its virtual aspect and supports twenty languages :

English (U.S.), English (UK), French (France), French (Canada), German, Japanese, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese (Portugal), Portuguese (Brazil), Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Russian, and Polish.

True to the spirit of its global ambitions, of crossing the shores to reach 70 countries across differerent linguistic georgraphies, the iPhone has polyglotism embedded in it.

Building upon the polyglotic feature: The third party applications:

Right now, at the App Store there are 168 multi-lingual apps. That is excluding the Word of the Day apps in many languages.

Let us begin at the Education Corridor of the App Store first. A quick look in here offered the following stats:

Apps Category: Education, Total Apps: 236, Multi or bi-lingual Apps: 71. That is, just above 30% of all the education apps are related with translation. The Languages covered include Spanish, German, French, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Arabic, Chinese and Japanese.

The major surprise, however, was hovering in the Travel category. Here are the stats.
Category: Travel, Apps: 209, Multi or bi-lingual Apps: 97 = 46%

Majority of these multilingual apps include Spanish, German, French and Italian. No surprises there.  However, the interesting aspect is that local languages, like Tamil and even Hindi are finding their way into the App Store.

Now, how does that help? Recently i was roaming around the Spanish part of California and did manage to land up in a sort of a Spanish ghetto. Luckily i was in a wi-fi area and managed to quickly download Talking Spanish Phrasebook for a quick look-up regarding some basic questions like whether someone could show me a place on the map. As iyt turned out, a nice sounding female voice also did the speaking and pronuncing part for me.

You will get a lot of these kind of quick reference mostly bi-lingual and some multi-lingual apps at the App Store. I have so far managed to figure out the following types:

1.    Phrase books: Translation of most used phrases. You are never lost in Seoul looking for a cup of coffee if you have Lonely Planet’s Korean phrasebook installed in your iPhone.)

2.    Basic beginners or language guides: (Better even, some of these multi-lingual apps have audio facilities embedded in them.  You iPhone speaking Greek to the waiter in a Restaurant is Athens, or speaking Turkish to the traffic police is not just extremely helpful, but also damn impressive!)

3.    Comprehensive dictionaries:

SlovoEd Compact French-German and German-French dictionary,
SlovoEd Compact French-Portuguese and Portuguese-French dictionary,
SlovoEd Compact German-Portuguese and Portuguese-German dictionary etc.

Most of these apps are within reasonable price range, from free to 25 dollars.

All these apps, however, function on pre-set linguistic databases. They do not do real time translation.

That, the web app, Google Translate. does. Google Translate provides bi-directional translation facilities for all the 23 languages that are currently supported by Google, right from your iPhone.

Flip side: Lost in Translation:

But as with Google Translate or any other digital babel fishes around - you have one problem. You cannot trust them. Try translating “Thank God It’s Friday” in one of the chosen Eastern languages for instance and check with your friend from, say, New delhi, India!

Weird even, it can do strange things to your dear EnglishThe only flip side, however, is not in polygltism, but in translation. This is what happened when Nilesh was trying to learn Mandarin by using the Google Translate web App through his iPhone.  He typed in “Machine Translation is the stupidest thing that man can afford”. When the translated Mandarin sentence was re-translated/translated back into English it read: “Machine translation is the translation that stupid big man can afford.”

iBabel? Or I babble?

In-between. If you are only talking of polyglotism, you are there. Lots of linguistic data. And pretty useful, specially the audio ones as I found out in a recent visit to the Spanish speaking part of Cupertino. But not exactly inspring when comes to “live” translation.

Overall, very useful, but a bit boring. Let us contend ourself with these boring but useful apps and stuffs till that blissful day comes when you can launch an “Artificial Language Intelligence” application on your iPhone and merrily tap along to customize the linguistic epicenters of your brain and have the greatest conversation on earth when you talk fluent Chinese with Mr. Yang in Beijing who will return the favor in his next visit to Istanbul with terrific Turkish.

Till that era of absolute bliss comes, engaging yourself in a bit of tactile language senuality of tapping and “touching” alien words and feeling their curves might not be a bad idea. If that doesn’t sound too weird to you…

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