Translator

Translator is a simple interface to online translation engine Babelfish. Translator currently supports translations between English, German and French and lets you get the translations for single words or whole sentences.
Translator is licensed under the GNU General Public License. The source code, jar and jad files are available for download here. To run it you will need either a mobile phone that supports Java MIDP or an emulator.

Usage is quite straightforward:

  • First, you enter phrase or word that you want to translate. How exactly you can enter it, depends on the device or emulator capabilities.
  • Then you select "Next" from the menu (or if it is bound to one of the soft keys, you just press that key).
  • Then you choose the language pair - "from" language and "to" language, with 'up' and 'down' keys on your device.
  • Press 'select' key on your device (usually green phone button) or choose "Select" from the menu. You can also use the menu to go back and correct the phrase you entered.
  • Wait for a while and you'll get the original and translated phrases.
  • From here you can go back to choose another language pair, or start again.

    • Known problems with Nokia emulator:

  • Currently Nokia phone emulator does not support input of European characters, such as Ö, Ç or ß. It can display them just fine, however:
  • Sometimes, Babelfish for no apparent reason refuses to give the translation with "Couldn't process your request, try again later". That's exactly what you should do, if you get empty translated string.
  • Translator remembers the last language pair you used, and sets is as the default one in language selection menu, but Nokia's emulator (as well as Sun's emulator) ignore this setting and always highlight the first entry anyway. I believe this is a bug in the emulators.
  • After a while, the emulator crashes. This is certainly a bug in the emulator, as midlets themselves should never ever cause a crash, just raise exceptions.

    Translator was written in December 2001 - January 2002 by Alexander Kanavin and was provided to Nokia as a Nokia Mobile Challenge contest entry.