Can you hear me now? Bueno!
| Thursday, September 28th, 2006 | --Sean |
I just found a cool little plugin for Yahoo! Messenger called iTranslate. What does it do, besides rip off Apple naming conventions? It sits in your conversation window and translates incoming messages from one language to another. Neat!
Sure, it's not a perfect application. Ideally, it would automatically do inline translations in both directions. Oh, and it's just silly that, when you ask the plugin to translate what you're about to send over (there's a button beneath the fold), it translates in the same direction as incoming messages. I mean, if I'm translating incoming messages from French to English, then I'm probably going to want to translate outgoing messages from English to French, right? Seems obvious to me, but I guess not to the plugin developer. The main thing, however, is that it's still a really cool idea and it can still get the job done --- you'd probably just want the plugin running for both participants in the conversation, with opposing translation directions.
Now I just need to make me some international friends that don't understand English. *grin* My French skills have atrophied considerably from their already mediocre high school levels, making it a bit tricky to evaluate cool language-oriented programs such as this one.