German-English text-to-voice Machine Translation 1.0

German-English text-to-voice Machine Translation is one of the many language-related software tools developed by Langsoft. Its aim is to help English speakers to have a quick translation of any German expression both in written and spoken form. Making use of text-to-speech technology, this translation tool generates audio messages in English that you can listen to as many times as needed.

The main asset of this free utility is probably its easiness of use. Actually, I think this is its only asset. This German to English translation tool lacks a standard interface – it opens a simple DOS window, where you can type the text in German that you wish to translate. You need to be very careful when writing the sentence or expression you need translating, as otherwise the program will not translate anything or just the words placed before the offending error. This can be something as simple as forgetting to add a period at the end of the sentence. This is where the limitations of DOS windows become evident, as you will not be able to cut and paste the original text in German to avoid typos and spelling mistakes. The level of accuracy required for the German does not correspond with the resulting text in English, which is usually full of mistakes and confusing expressions.

This faulty translation teams up with a poor synthetic speech to produce a very low-quality audio output. It will use your default audio player to play back the translated text, or whatever part of it has made it to the English translation. Even when the program has managed to make some sense out of the text in German, there is no guarantee that the translated text is correct. Thus, the sentence “Meine Freundin ist krank geworden” was translated as “My girl friend is fall illing”. In most cases, a translation like this will be enough to help you grasp the sense of the text, but nothing more.

The idea behind this tool is a good one, but it would require further refining to be really useful for the user.