Hello all,

I was wondering if anyone knows of a good translation program that can be loaded onto a Droid phone that does NOT require an active connection to the web (so not Google translator).

Currently I need french as I will be visiting parts of french speaking africa in the near future. Other languages would be sweet of course.

Many thanks!

You can try this one for French-English



But I don't think any off-line solution is going to be as elegant as Google Translate or one of the other on-line translator programs. Have you looked into getting prepaid 3G in the countries you are traveling in? People in Africa are poor. It's a good bet their prepaid 3G service is cheap.

Just tried the QR barcode and it didn't work for me. Link here. https://market.android.com/details?id=com.jdsolutions.android.offline_eng_fr

Thanks IAS!

Getting the 3G card is an option but unfortunately some of the places I am going being connected would depend in the grace of the monger gods and which way the wind is blowing.

Will give it a shot and report back.

Thanks again,

CC

Ultralingua does very comprehensive dictionaries for the iOS but haven't yet ported them over to Android's. When they do you'll be hard pressed to find better ones.

Dictionaries that is - not sentence translators.

CC

I've never been to Africa so I don't know but I'd be surprised if it's hard to get 3G data access somehow in all but the most fucked up countries. Often it's the poorest countries that have the most modern cellular system because it was just installed 2 years ago whereas places like the US are upgrading 20 year old systems. Plus in the third world no one sues the phone company when they put up a 20 zillion watt cell phone tower in the middle of the playground of an orphanage or something so it is much easier to roll out a cellular system. Which countries? For instance I've read Nigeria has cheap prepaid 3G. Even in the warlord run countries, the warlord himself often signs a deal with some international cellular provider to install a modern cell system and pay the profits back to the warlord.

I think Chicachaser hit on the main problem you will encounter with any off-line solution. They are basically dictionaries that translate words. Online apps like Google translate and others use Google's omnipotent all knowing servers or other's servers, to try and divine context and overall meaning rather than just translating simple words.

For French-English especially Google translate is cool because it has conversational mode where you verbally speak English, the phone verbally plays it back in French, you hand off the phone to the French speaker and they verbally reply in French and the phone verbally plays it back in English. I'd say worth a little extra effort to look into getting local prepaid 3G data service.

Very good points there.

It is true in fact that in many african countries a couple of technologies have been skipped. In uganda and kenya using a landline is almost not possible, everyone goes around with a cell.

I will be hitting Madagascar... I certainly plan on having my cellular connected but we will see what the internet charges turn out to be.

For Madagascar it looks like Telma may be the ticket.?????

http://www.telma.mg/particuliers/mobile/3g.htm

Me no read da French to good but it looks like prepaid 3G is a standard ordinary thing.