Translator Keyboard

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Translator Keyboard is one of the newly available thirdparty keyboards for iOS 8 (see p104 for more), and will appeal to anyone who regularly contacts speakers of other languages. To use it, simply swipe left to select your ‘from’ and ‘to’ languages, then type your message. Hit the button and let it work its magic, using the Microsoft Translate API.

As a keyboard, Translator Keyboard is slightly on the unresponsive side, failing to register some key taps, which can mean frustrating errors. As with any machine translation system, the translations themselves can be a bit wobbly – especially between languages with significantly differing word orders. It’s probably wise to have a smattering of knowledge of the language you’re translating into so you can avoid obvious gaffes. For £1.49, though, we don’t expect miracles, and this handy tool will hopefully improve in tandem with the translation database. Lise Smith

A simple tool that’s useful if you send a lot of foreign language texts, but beware the language limitations.