Electronic Language Translators and Electronic Dictionaries to enhance your travel experience

Whenever I travel, I always try and learn some words or phrases of the countries that I’m visiting.  It’s always nice to be able to greet people in their own language or to say thank you or goodbye. You frequently get a nice reaction and it’s also thrilling to know that people do appreciate that you are making an effort at learning their language.  For favourite countries, like Italy, it would have been better if I had enrolled in classes and managed more than the cursory few phrases. Unfortunately, we all live such busy lives these days and learning languages for me seem to always get pushed onto the backburner.

Tony did some research into Electronic Language Translators and Electronic Dictionaries and believes that they have come of age. Latest developments make them more practical to use when travelling abroad, even in countries where you can “get by” in the language. Even when you’ve learned a language like French and German, through lack of usage one tends to forget words and it’s not till after a few days in the place that your recollection starts to slowly kick in.  Meanwhile, you’ve left your host thoroughly puzzled at the string of words that you’ve left behind.

So what’s new in the latest electronic translators –  This is what Tony discovered:

The BIG new feature that really knocks off your socks the first time you hear it is the translator with two-way audio translation capability.  Select your situation, speak what you want to say into the translator, and out comes the translation spoken by a native speaker – shades of Star Trek! Really cool.

Thanks to the huge memory capacities available and faster processors etc., these things really work, even in Chinese, which is a tonal language!

They make dictionaries in more than 20 languages and in various price categories, suitable for business travellers, tourists, students, etc. etc., but in Tony’s view the ones you should be checking out are the iTravel range; they’re the ones featuring real human voice output as recorded by native speakers, with an extensive database including up to 1,000,000 words and more than 14,000 travel-related phrases depending on the language (and they’re expandable and customizable).  You can also have several languages all in the one device, too.  This sounds like something I would absolutely love.

For more information, on these accessories, click on our Ectaco page.

Helen