-GF Offline Translator:
-text and speech translation for 16 languages with
-quality control. Version 19 April 2017 (beta).
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-Speech input: Tap microphone icon and talk while it is red.
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-Text input: Select "keyboard" from menu, tap keyboard icon.
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-Correction: Tap input text and edit.
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-Alternatives: Tap output text.
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-Grammar info: Tap any of the alternatives.
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-Confidence: colour of output text
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Green: semantic, probably correct (but has alternatives)
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Yellow: syntactic, often incorrect (has alternatives)
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-Topics (new, select from menu): Words grouped by semantic categories, with WordNet glosses.
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-Phrasebook (new, select from menu): Conceptual authoring with the green translations.
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More details
-
-GF Offline Translator is based on grammar and semantics. It is compact in size
-and gives control on quality. Its technology is inspired by compilers, which are
-programs that translate computer languages.
-Most other translators for human language are based on
-statistics and have less control of quality and are much bigger, so that
-they require either an internet connection or a huge storage on your phone.
-
-The app indicates translation confidence with colours:
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Green:
- semantic translation, should be correct.
- But not necessarily the only correct one.
- You can tap the output to see alternatives.
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Yellow:
- syntactic translation, should be grammatically correct.
- But can be very strange in its interpretation and choice of words.
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Light red:
- chunk translation, probably incorrect.
- Builds the translation from small pieces.
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Dark red:
- word-by-word translation, almost certainly incorrect.
- Builds the translation word by word.
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-The green translations come from a tourist phrasebook, which allows
-you to translate things like "hello" and "how far is the airport from
-the hotel".
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-You can translate both speech and text, as selected in the menu in the
-upper right corner. Both kinds of input can be edited with the
-keyboard by first tapping at the input field. This is often needed
-because of speech recognition errors. Changing words
-from upper to lower case may also be needed.
-At the moment, Japanese and Thai input must be separated
-to words, whereas Chinese works without spaces.
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-Translation works between any of the 16 supported languages, which means 240
-language pairs in the current version. But different languages are on different levels of development.
-The following table gives a rough idea of what to expect:
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coverage
quality
speed
speech
-
Bulgarian
in only
-
Catalan
-
Chinese
-
Dutch
-
English
-
Estonian
-
Finnish
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French
-
German
-
Hindi
-
Italian
-
Japanese*
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Russian
-
Spanish
-
Swedish
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Thai*
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-* For translation from Japanese and Thai you need to separate each word with a space
-
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-The speech input and output use Google's voice services. Their status
-can hence change without notice. You can make it more stable by
-installing third-party speech tools, such as SVOX, which provides
-output for most of the listed languages.
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-When you tap on a translation you get a screen with alternative translations.
-Tapping on each of the alternatives
-gives you grammatical information:
-an inflection table, if it is a single word,
-and a syntax tree otherwise.
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-The app also provides an input method which you can use as
-an alternative keyboard which allows you to do translation from
-other applications, for instance while you are entering SMS or e-mail.
-To activate it go to Settings > Language & input.
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-The translation works completely off-line, without
-internet connection, when doing text-based translation.
-Even speech works off-line in some languages,
-but being on-line may give you better
-speech input and output and more languages.
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-You can also install third-party off-line speech engines, such as
-SVOX.
-Consult the voice/language settings on your phone to find the optimal
-speech engines, and restart the app after changing the settings.
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-The GF Offline Translator is powered by
-GF, Grammatical Framework.
-It is open-source software,
-built by support from the GF community and from Digital Grammars.
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-Digital Grammars is a company that can tailor this app to you needs and provide good
-translation for the kind of vocabulary you need. Just tell us what you want to see
- in the green area!
-