If you think you can carry a pocket Hindi guide on your trip to India and cover everything, you are clearly mistaken. India is home to several regional languages, and even when I travel to other parts of the country, I often struggle with basic communication and instructions. Enter our Windows Phone.
mTranslator is an interactive Windows Phone 8 app that allows you to translate English to nine Indian languages. The app is developed by Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), a premier R&D organization under the Ministry of Communications & Information Technology (MCIT) of Government of India. The app is based on their AnglaMT and Anuvadaksh Machine Translation System.
At the moment, the app supports English to Bengali, Hindi, Punjabi, Malayalam, Telegu, Tamil, Marathi, Oriya, and Urdu. The app works online, so you can’t translate if you don’t have an active data connection or are on WiFi.
The app has an easy and intuitive user interface, and also allows you to customize the font size. Once you specify the text to translate in English, you also get the transliterated output. The app also includes a sample sentence database which includes common conversation sentences.
While the idea and user experience is neat, the app crashes often. It might have to do with the connection to backend server, because the crashes only happen when the app is looking for a translation. Some translations also returned incomprehensible errors. Also, I’d wish the samples database could be pre-fetched so that those are available offline.
mTranslator is a great app if you are traveling to or within India. I’m hoping an update comes soon to resolve the issues, otherwise it’d be a pain to use it as your go to translation app. Download it free for Windows Phone 8 devices from the Windows Phone Store, and keep your fingers crossed when you fire the app.
