

Speak in French: Mantaphrase, an app that enables language foreign conversation - wlue
http://www.mantaphrase.com/blog/2012/12/13/mantaphrase-1.0.1-french/

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temac
"Puis-je avoir le menu encore, s'il vous plaît?" does not sound 100% correct
for a native speaker, although this is perfectly comprehensible. "Puis-je à
nouveau avoir le menu, s'il vous plaît ?" would be better, especially coming
from a professional application... (also note the typography is not 100%
correct too; in French you have to put a space before double-strike
punctuation).

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temac
Curiously, even the translation proposed by Google translate is better than
the one proposed by this application; "Puis-je avoir le menu à nouveau, s'il
vous plaît?" sounds as fine as "Puis-je à nouveau avoir le menu, s'il vous
plaît ?", although Google get the punctuation false too.

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MIT_Hacker
Good ol' wlue. This is one of the few apps I continuously suggests to my
friends.

I'm a lover of languages, but it can be really daunting to go to a new
country, even though it's the best way to learn.

Mantaphrase breaks down that barrier.

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pilgrim689
Which country did you try it in, Japan or China? I'm curious to hear how a use
of this actually turned out.

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benbataille
Interesting application but I think they should bring a native french speaker
on board. The french sentence provided in the only screenshot isn't correct.

"Puis-je avoir le menu encore, s'il vous plaît ?" is a word for word
translation of english. Unfortunately, "encore" needs to be put before the
complement and the correct form would be : "Puis-je encore avoir le menu, s'il
vous plaît ?". And even like this, it still sound phoney and using "à nouveau"
would be better. French tends to be more tricky than english as its rules of
construction admit a lot of irregularities.

I don't know how they get the translation. Apparently, they have a set of
sentences translated "by hand". Well, if I was them, I wouldn't be too prompt
to criticised machine translation as they do on their home page. Google
Translate got the sentence they failed right. With a huge corpus (Google uses
the European parliament translations if I remember correctly) and proper
alignment, the result can be pretty awesome. Google Translate is now really
awesome for European language and will probably give as good if not better
results than a phrase book but I don't know how good it is for Asian
languages.

Did someone compare both Google Translate and Mantaphrase for Japanese or
Chinese ? Of course, Mantaphrase still has the advantage that it can work
offline.

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lucaspiller
> Google Translate is now really awesome for European language

For major European languages. Try something like Lithuanian and you'll most
likely get something completely wrong.

~~~
frenchfries
Well, actually even for French and Spanish I can tell you it's not really
trustworthy...

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x711li_yc
Made in Waterloo ;)

[http://velocity.uwaterloo.ca/velocity-
startups/mantaphrase-l...](http://velocity.uwaterloo.ca/velocity-
startups/mantaphrase-launch)

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incision
I really like the concept/look of this app, here's hoping an Android version
[1] materializes.

"From those visits, we had 3,200 users initiate 13,000 conversations powered
by Mantaphrase."

Somehow, I'd have expected more conversations per user. Any insight as to how
many casual versus frequent users you've ended up with?

1: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4632880>

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mrspeaker
That's very cool, well done! Though I actually laughed out loud thinking about
the look you'd get from a french waiter if you pulled this out at a brasserie.

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matt2
Doesn't Google's Translate app already do this?

<http://www.google.com/mobile/translate/>

Does Mantaphrase work offline? I think Translate requires a data connection.

I can't really think of another use case, though.

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alexhawdon
Different thing. Mantaphrase appears to provide pre-set categorised phrases
for you to select, which you can then show/say a good translation of to the
person with whom you're conversing. It then intelligently provides follow-up
phrases you might want to use afterwards. And yes, this all works offline.

From what I can tell, it's the modern equivalent of a 'phrase book', which
makes sense and is a pretty good idea, imo.

As someone else has posted, it would be interesting to know how many users are
out there actually using it in the real world. The statistics seem to suggest
that there have been a lot of people download it and play with it a few times.

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e40
iPhone/iPod only. No Android love, sadly. I really wanted to try this.

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desas
What does it do that the google translate app doesn't?

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dorian-graph
Loading the page that this story links to will show you at least several small
things.

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huhtenberg
Does the app work offline?

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alexhawdon
Their site says it does

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huhtenberg
Yep, just found it too. Awesome.

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camus
Or you could phone me and then visit me in Paris.

