Is called Jibbigo and is a mobile app. It's not the first to do simultaneous translations, but it has a peculiarity that makes it unique in its kind: it can be used in offline mode, i.e. without the need to connect to translation servers via the Internet. Of course it also remains there online mode typical of other translation tools like “Google Translate”. The choice therefore makes a large number of users happy, who can decide the method according to the data space on their device or the availability of an Internet connection.
But that's not all, because, looking at the list of supported languages on the application's official website, the eye immediately falls on the presence of languages that adopt non-Latin alphabets or which are commonly judged difficult for learning, at least by Westerners, such as Mandarin, Japanese, Thai, Korean and Iraqi. A rarity in this field.
The software, which is free in its basic version (for which an Internet connection is required), is created by a team of experts from the Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh (U.S.) and since Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (Germany). Currently it is possible to download the app from both the Android and Apple markets. Operation is simple: just type the sentences to be translated with the keyboard of your portable device or pronounce them, in English (or in the language of your choice), through the microphone which is used during telephone conversations (but it is also possible to adopt an external bluetooth or cable one).
For the most demanding, but only for those who have a smartphone or tablet with plenty of space available for applications, there is the possibility of completely downloading the individual translation modules, in order to operate offline. Each module costs 3,80 € and, to get them all – English, Chinese (Mandarin), Filipino, French, German, Iraqi Arabic (only on Apple), Japanese, Korean, Spanish – it costs about 30 euros. Downloading is not exactly a walk: you need a stable connection and without traffic limits because it is about downloading 180MB of data, for example, only for the English-Japanese module.
As for the "road test“, the result of the translations is truly surprising: the internal search engine that replaces the words is based on a highly sophisticated statistical algorithm that adapt each word to the context of the sentences translated. Speech synthesis technology is very advanced: the audio is surprisingly naturalalmost human.
