How good are the translation apps on the iPhone? Can they be used for patient communication?

by: Adarsh Gupta Friday, September 10th, 2010

translation Most of the translation apps on iPhone uses Google Translation in the back ground. Some offer voice (some free and some charges small fee) translation. Some offers options to email or text or copy the translated content and some don’t.

But the question is are all the translations good enough? Are the Hindi, Chinese, Arabic translations accurate? The answer to this question is it depends. If you have a few words sentences or simply meaning of a word, then they do do good job in translation. But if you have a long sentence, the translation may loose the real meaning or gist of the original statement specially in Hindi and Chinese that I can tell from my own experience.

Spanish translations are however more reliable than any other language. As I have not used any other language translations, it is hard for me know as to how good the translations are.

None the less, it is better than nothing. When you have to talk to a patient who does not speak commonly spoken language, Google Translations does become handy. You can type a small sentence in English and Google translates in the desired language. You can then either have the patient read the translation on your phone or can play the voice (provided by some apps).

Here are some good Translation apps

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