The Olympic Translator

All eyes are on London as the 2012 Summer Olympics are held there now. Moreover, the cosmopolitan city welcomed participants from 216 countries, as well as thousands of tourists, who went there to become part of the amazing Olympic spirit. This is exactly a situation where translation services can be very, very handy.

That is why professor Giovanni Tata from Brigham Young University in Utah, USA, has developed a special mobile application. The free app, called London2012 Translator took almost three years to be finished and the key idea with it is to be a useful and reliable tool for connecting people.
The app was developed by collecting multiple phrases from native speakers, phrases that would be used during the Olympic Games, as well as phrases for different situations — emergency, guiding etc. The collection includes nearly 6 000 phrases, and the app works with Google Translate, because as prof. Tata himself says, it's impossible to "think of all the phrases that could possibly be used". Other of the app's advantages is that it update automatically with translations added by users.

Here you can read more about the app.