Speech input: Tap microphone icon and talk while it is red.
Text input: Select "keyboard" from menu, tap keyboard icon.
Correction: Tap input text.
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, usually very bad

## More details

The Human Language Compiler is a translator for human language based on programming language technology: grammars and semantics. Therefore it is compact in size and gives control on quality. Most other translator are based on statistics and have less controll of quality and either require an internet connection or have a much bigger size.

The app is small (under 30 MB for all languages in off-line translation). We do not show ads.

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".

You can translate both speech and text, as selected in the menu in the upper right corner. Both kinds of input can be edited with the keyboard by first tapping at the input field. This is often needed because of speech recognition errors. Changing words from upper to lower case may also be needed.

Translation works between any pair of the supported languages, which means 132 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
Catalan |  |  |  | in only
Chinese |  |  |  | diff in/out*
Dutch |  |  |  |
English |  |  |  |
Finnish |  |  |  | in only
French |  |  |  |
German |  |  |  |
Hindi |  |  |  | in only
Italian |  |  |  |
Spanish |  |  |  |
Swedish |  |  |  | in only

*Chinese uses Mandarin for input and Cantonese for output.

The speech input and output use Google's voice services. Their status can hence change without notice. You can make it more stable by installing third-party speech tools, such as SVOX, which also provides output in Finnish and Swedish.

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, when doing text-based translation. Even speech works off-line in some languages, but being on-line may give you better speech input and output. You can also install third-party off-line speech engines, such as SVOX.

Powered by GF, based on open-source software, built by support from the GF community and from Digital Grammars.

Digital Grammars 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!