It happens on every mission trip to a non-English speaking country.
You need to communicate something to a national but there aren’t any interpreters around. You might try making hand gestures or frantically thumb through your little phrase book, but what if you could press a button on your phone to translate what you want to say?
That’s the promise made by a number of language translation apps (“applications”) for mobile phones like the iPhone. We’ve looked at several of them, but the best we’ve discovered seems to be Odyssey Translator, available for iPhone and iPod touch.
Odyssey has several different languages available, each sold separately starting at $5. Current offerings are Italian, French, Spanish, German, Portuguese, and Mandarin Chinese. The company reports that Dutch, Russian, Japanese and Greek are under development.
Odyssey Translators are 100% resident on your iPhone or iTouch—no wi-fi or data connection needed. Select what you want to say from 210 categories and the app allows you to build your own phrases and sentences–more than 100,000 of them. You can actually hear how to pronounce the words.
One reviewer wrote “We travel to Cozumel often and I like to try to speak as much Spanish as possible as a courtesy. After trying several other translators, I came across this one. It’s AMAZING. Not only does it teach you the words, it will show you how to pronounce them too. You will love it!”
Odyssey does have several scaled-down versions that they offer for free, but judging by the reviews, you would be best to steer clear of them. We suggest sticking to the “pro” (paid) versions if you want something that is actually beneficial.
Do you have a recommendation for a good app for cross-cultural communication? We’d love to hear about it. Please comment and share your thoughts.
We will continue our series on apps for mission trips with our next blog, which will focus on apps to plan and organize your travel.
Stay tuned—there’s an app for that!