GF Offline Translator: text and speech translation for 14 languages with quality control

Speech input : Tap microphone icon if available on the keyboard.
Text input : Select the text box at the bottom on the screen.
Correction : Tap input text to copy it to the text box.
Alternatives : Tap output text.
Grammar info : Tap any of the alternatives.
Confidence : colour of output text

- Green : semantic, probably correct (but has alternatives)
- Yellow : syntactic, often incorrect (has alternatives)
- Light red : chunk-based, probably incorrect (has alternatives)
- Dark red : word-based, often very bad

## More details

GF Offline Translator is based on grammar and semantics. It is compact in size and gives control on quality. Its technology is inspired by compilers, which are programs that translate computer languages. Most other translators for human language are based on statistics and have less control of quality and are much bigger, so that they require either an internet connection or a huge storage on your phone.

The app indicates translation confidence with colours:

- Green: semantic translation, should be correct. But not necessarily the only correct one. You can tap the output to see alternatives.
- Yellow: syntactic translation, should be grammatically correct. But can be very strange in its interpretation and choice of words.
- 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 come from a tourist phrasebook, which allows you to translate things like "hello" and "how far is the airport from the hotel".

Translation works between any supported languages, which means 182 language pairs in the current version. But different languages are on different levels of development. The following table gives a rough idea of what to expect:

| coverage | quality | speed
--- | --- | --- | ---
Bulgarian |  |  |
Catalan |  |  |
Chinese |  |  |
Dutch |  |  |
English |  |  |
Finnish |  |  |
French |  |  |
German |  |  |
Hindi |  |  |
Italian |  |  |
Japanese |  |  |
Spanish |  |  |
Swedish |  |  |
Thai |  |  |

For Japanse and Thai input, words must be separated with spaces.

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.

To make it easier to input what you want to translate it is recommended to add that language keyboard in your settings on your iOS device. You can add keyboards from Settings > General > Keyboard > Keyboards. If more than one language is added, you can change the language while typing. Follow these steps to change the language of your keyboard once you’ve added it:

- Tap the globe icon in the lower left corner to choose the next language on your keyboard. The chosen language appears on the Space bar.
- Touch and hold the globe icon in the lower left to display a menu of enabled keyboards. Drag to choose a new keyboard.

The translation works completely off-line, without internet connection, when doing text-based translation. Speech input needs an connection to work.

The GF Offline Translator is powered by GF, Grammatical Framework. It is open-source software, built by support from the GF community and from Digital Grammars.

Digital Grammars is a company that can tailor this app to you needs and provide good translation for the kind of vocabulary you need. Just tell us what you want to see in the green area!