Medical Translation Insight

Smartphones are getting, well, smarter. Whether you want to use your mobile phone as a medical device or as an on-the-fly translator, there's "an app for you".

Recently, translation applications available on the iPhone have grown exponentially. There are now more than a dozen translation applications in Apple's AppStore. Some are language-specific and some are task specific.

Two promising new arrivals are Jibbigo and PicTranslator.

According to Slashdot, Jibbigo turns the iPhone into a translator that converts English speech into Spanish, or vice versa. Users simply speak a sentence or two at a time into the iPhone and the iPhone will respond with an audible translation, as shown in this demo:


PicTranslator lets you take a picture of the text you want translated, choose the language you want to translate from, and have PicTranslator translate it for you. As described on Lifehacker, once you know the (hopefully correct) translation, you can even ask PicTranslator to help you pronounce the foreign-language version. Here is a demo:


While tools like PicTranslator and Jibbigo will not replace professional medical translators anytime soon, they will be a boon for doctor-patient communications and users with casual translation needs.

Want to know more about machine translation? Check out these three articles:

• To automatically translate email messages, we have in the past covered Miilos.
• In machine translation, an important question is "What is good enough quality?".
• Machine translation is terrific - but user beware!