Google announced on Thursday that it
has developed version of its Google Translate web service that's designed specifically for iPhone and iPod touch users.
"Google Translate for iPhone is optimized for speed, supports all of the existing Google Translate language pairs, and uses a client-side data-store on your iPhone to hang on to your past translations so you always have them at hand, even if you can't use the local data network," the company said on its mobile blog. "We wrote this using the AJAX Language API, so every time the Google Translate team updates the languages they support, the languages will automatically be added here."
Google software engineer Allen Hutchison recently took the new web app for a test run as part of a recent trip to Spain. He found that he could perform between 200 and 400 translations before exceeding 1MB of data download, which cost him less than $10 on his international roaming plan for the iPhone.
The Google Translate service itself is free. iPhone and iPod touch users can access the web app by going to
www.google.com and choosing the "more" tab, or by typing
translate.google.com directly.
Topics: iPhone apps, iPhone 3G, iPod touch, iPhone
