Translation apps on mobile devices are extremely helpful when people are travelling to countries where they don’t speak local language. However, most of translation apps have been working only over the internet, and their use might be quite paintful when in roaming with no good wi-fi connection abroad.
Yandex.Translate, an app launched two years ago, now has a free offline version for iPhone and iPad. Five language pairs are available for offline translation: English-German, English-French, English-Italian, English-Spanish and English-Russian.
If an English-speaking user is travelling from the UK to Spain, they’ll only need the English-Spanish offline translation database to get by day-to-day, while the other language pairs will only be available online (the app warns about this). After returning home to the UK, the user can delete the English-Spanish offline translation data to free up space.
Yandex.Translate is statistical machine translator which is based on searching and indexing parallel texts on the internet. This technology looks for already translated texts and phrases, compares them with the original and ranks them according to how often they occur. These parallel texts, phrases and word combinations are quite cumbersome, taking up gigabytes on our servers. For the translation app to work offline, we had to streamline the parallel translation database, so that only the most common translations remained. For example, if the full translation database gives 100 different ways to translate “where can I get the best tapas in Barcelona” into Spanish, the mobile version will retain only the 10 most commonly used translations.
Our statistics show that Yandex.Translate is used in private correspondence, school homework and university assignments, for reading tourism guides or news on the internet, for translating recipes, poems and songs. The average length of translations on mobile devices is five to seven words. At present, Yandex.Translate handles about 400,000 translations on mobile platforms every day. Most of our users are in Russia, but we are working on making the app popular outside our home country.
