Speak in French: Mantaphrase, an app that enables language foreign conversation

http://www.mantaphrase.com/blog/2012/12/13/mantaphrase-1.0.1-french/

by wlue • 14 years ago

51 20 14 years ago

mantaphrase.com

MIT_Hacker• 14 years ago

Good ol' wlue. This is one of the few apps I continuously suggests to my friends.

I'm a lover of languages, but it can be really daunting to go to a new country, even though it's the best way to learn.

Mantaphrase breaks down that barrier.

pilgrim689• 14 years ago

Which country did you try it in, Japan or China? I'm curious to hear how a use of this actually turned out.

x711li_yc• 14 years ago

Made in Waterloo ;)

http://velocity.uwaterloo.ca/velocity-startups/mantaphrase-l...

camus• 14 years ago

Or you could phone me and then visit me in Paris.

mrspeaker• 14 years ago

That's very cool, well done! Though I actually laughed out loud thinking about the look you'd get from a french waiter if you pulled this out at a brasserie.

e40• 14 years ago

iPhone/iPod only. No Android love, sadly. I really wanted to try this.

desas• 14 years ago

What does it do that the google translate app doesn't?

dorian-graph• 14 years ago

Loading the page that this story links to will show you at least several small things.

MrSourz• 14 years ago

Works offline.

incision• 14 years ago

I really like the concept/look of this app, here's hoping an Android version [1] materializes.

"From those visits, we had 3,200 users initiate 13,000 conversations powered by Mantaphrase."

Somehow, I'd have expected more conversations per user. Any insight as to how many casual versus frequent users you've ended up with?

1: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4632880

matt2• 14 years ago

Doesn't Google's Translate app already do this?

http://www.google.com/mobile/translate/

Does Mantaphrase work offline? I think Translate requires a data connection.

I can't really think of another use case, though.

alexhawdon2• 14 years ago

Different thing. Mantaphrase appears to provide pre-set categorised phrases for you to select, which you can then show/say a good translation of to the person with whom you're conversing. It then intelligently provides follow-up phrases you might want to use afterwards. And yes, this all works offline.

From what I can tell, it's the modern equivalent of a 'phrase book', which makes sense and is a pretty good idea, imo.

As someone else has posted, it would be interesting to know how many users are out there actually using it in the real world. The statistics seem to suggest that there have been a lot of people download it and play with it a few times.

huhtenberg2• 14 years ago

Does the app work offline?

alexhawdon2• 14 years ago

Their site says it does

huhtenberg2• 14 years ago

Yep, just found it too. Awesome.

temac2• 14 years ago

"Puis-je avoir le menu encore, s'il vous plaît?" does not sound 100% correct for a native speaker, although this is perfectly comprehensible. "Puis-je à nouveau avoir le menu, s'il vous plaît ?" would be better, especially coming from a professional application... (also note the typography is not 100% correct too; in French you have to put a space before double-strike punctuation).

temac2• 14 years ago

Curiously, even the translation proposed by Google translate is better than the one proposed by this application; "Puis-je avoir le menu à nouveau, s'il vous plaît?" sounds as fine as "Puis-je à nouveau avoir le menu, s'il vous plaît ?", although Google get the punctuation false too.

benbataille• 14 years ago

Interesting application but I think they should bring a native french speaker on board. The french sentence provided in the only screenshot isn't correct.

"Puis-je avoir le menu encore, s'il vous plaît ?" is a word for word translation of english. Unfortunately, "encore" needs to be put before the complement and the correct form would be : "Puis-je encore avoir le menu, s'il vous plaît ?". And even like this, it still sound phoney and using "à nouveau" would be better. French tends to be more tricky than english as its rules of construction admit a lot of irregularities.

I don't know how they get the translation. Apparently, they have a set of sentences translated "by hand". Well, if I was them, I wouldn't be too prompt to criticised machine translation as they do on their home page. Google Translate got the sentence they failed right. With a huge corpus (Google uses the European parliament translations if I remember correctly) and proper alignment, the result can be pretty awesome. Google Translate is now really awesome for European language and will probably give as good if not better results than a phrase book but I don't know how good it is for Asian languages.

Did someone compare both Google Translate and Mantaphrase for Japanese or Chinese ? Of course, Mantaphrase still has the advantage that it can work offline.

lucaspiller• 14 years ago

> Google Translate is now really awesome for European language

For major European languages. Try something like Lithuanian and you'll most likely get something completely wrong.

frenchfries• 14 years ago

Well, actually even for French and Spanish I can tell you it's not really trustworthy...

Speak in French: Mantaphrase, an app that enables language foreign conversation

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