The Human Language Compiler - a mobile speech and text translation app for Android

Download for free from Play Store!

Or try first a web version of the translator

The Human Language Compiler differs from other translation systems that are currently available, by using grammars and semantics to perform the translation. Other systems use either statistics or shallow rules based on dictionary lookup. Our technology is similar to the way in which a compiler translates program code to machine code - hence the name of our system.

The technology enables the system to be compact in size and give control on quality. It indicates confidence with colours:

Green: semantic translation, should be correct. But not necessarily the only correct one.
Yellow: syntactic translation, should be grammatically correct. But can be very strange in its interpretation and choice of words; there can also be bugs in word inflection and genders.
Light red: chunk translation, probably incorrect. Builds the translation from small pieces.
Dark red: word-by-word translation, almost certainly incorrect. Builds the translation word by word.

The green translations currently come from a tourist phrasebook, which allows you to translate things like "hello" and "how far is the airport from the hotel". But this part can be easily adapted to other uses, such as technical language.

You can translate both speech and text, as selected in the menu in the upper right corner. Translation works between any pair of the supported languages, which means 110 language pairs at the moment. But different languages are on different levels of development. The following table gives a rough idea of what to expect:

	coverage	quality	speed	speech
Bulgarian				in only
Chinese				diff in/out
Dutch
English
Finnish
French
German
Hindi				out only
Italian
Spanish
Swedish

This is new and experimental technology, and we are constantly working on the app. Expect frequent updates and improvements!

When you tap on a translation you get a screen with alternative translations. Tapping on each of the alternatives gives you grammatical information: an inflection table, if it is a single word, and a syntax tree otherwise.

The app also provides an input method which you can use as an alternative keyboard which allows you to do translation from other applications, for instance while you are entering SMS or e-mail. To activate it go to Settings > Language & input.

The Human Languge Compiler works completely off-line, without internet connection, although being on-line may give you better speech input and output and enable it for more languages. The app is small (around 24 MB for all languages). We do not show ads.

Digital Grammars can tailor this app to you needs - tell us what you want to see in the green area!

Publication: EACL 2014 demo paper