Originally Posted by
BLI-Flyer
There's a pretty major glitch as far as this being a useful interactive translation tool. Say you're visiting a Spanish speaking country and you don't speak Spanish. You'd set the input language to English, the output language to Spanish, type in the phrase you want translated and show the result to the person you're "talking" to. Now, hand the Kindle to that person so they can communicate back to you. They would set the input language to English, but the output languages are still only French, Spanish, and Russian, there is no option to translate back into English! There does not seem to be an alternate keyboard to enter accent marks or to use alternate alphabets.
Hey BLI,
I understand what you mean, and I did consider that when I was writing it but for the moment it seemed like it was more work than it was worth. There's two barriers: 1) In order to do that, it would require a virtual on screen keyboard (which is possible) for many languages. For example, "Самолет" would be impossible to enter with the hardware as is. So would "Straßen". That's doable, but it would require a little more work. 2) There's an issue of getting the other person knowing how to input their message, even with the keyboard. Presented with two keyboards and not sure what to do, there's a good chance that the kindle would get in the way them trying to communicate back to you as the tech becomes the focus.
My thought was that if I can't ask where the bathroom is, how am I going to help them use my Kindle, if need be?
That said, a basic "dialog mode" could be done, by flipping the in and outputs when the submit button is pressed. That would get it close, even with the keyboard issue. As is, you can do reverse translates (set input language to whatever it is and the selected output language to English) but it doesn't switch automatically. That would be pretty quick if that's something that's wanted.
As for the "French, Spanish, Russian", this may sound like an odd question but is it unclear that those are drop down lists? To me I see it automatically, but I've heard the same from someone else and starting to wonder if I need better labeling to make sure it's obvious. Output language can be anything that's supported by Google. There should be 56 options there.
