Trippo Mondo is an amazing language translation application. It is not perfect, but it is very impressive in the functionality that it presents, and incredibly inexpensive at $4.99 (USD). And, by the way, the ‘perfect’ language translation application has yet to be created. I will get into the ‘why’ of that in a moment.

Trippo Mondo translates words, phrases, and sentences between 27 different languages. You type in the word, phrase, or sentence in your own language, select the target language, click the translate button, and see the translated text in the target language in a field to the right of your language field. Moreover, and this is a great part of the application, in most languages the application also has text-to-speech rendering engine that allows your mobile device to pronounce the translated word, phrase, or sentence in the target language. Now, that’s very impressive, at least in theory.

Does the theory stand up to practice? I took it for a test drive on a Nokia Symbian (S60 5th Edition) device, my Nokia N97, although I should point out that the application is also available on a number of Series 40 devices as well as a variety of S60 devices. The main difference is that on an Series 40 device one scrolls down a list of languages using the rocker switch instead of the touch screen.

My languages are English, Spanish, and French, so I tried it out first on these. I typed in ‘How can I get to the border?’ as a test phrase and clicked on the Translate button. At this point, the application reaches out to the Internet to access the Trippo Mondo translation servers, so the mobile device must be connected to the Internet at that time. Mine was, and returned the correct phrase shown in the screen capture below.

Trippo Mondo translates and speaks the translated phrase.

Technically, I should note that while ‘frontera’ is the worldwide translation of ‘border’ in Spanish, those passing between Mexico and the U.S. know the ‘frontera’ as a 25-kilometer zone on either side of the border, and the actual international boundary passage point is often referred to as the ‘garita’, or ‘sentry box’.

Out of curiosity, I then had the application translate the phrase back into English, and got the following result:

Reverse translation of the same phrase back into English.

Not an exact translation, but probably good enough for interpretation by the other party.

When the phrase was translated into French, the sever did come up with an exact translation.

Translation from Spanish to French worked fine.

Note that there is a Send button in the middle. This allows the consumer to send the query and translation as an SMS, Twitter, MMS, email, or Facebook message.

The 27 languages translated by Trippo Mondo include: Arabic, Bulgarian, simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Hausa, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Pashto, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Serbian, Thai, and Urdu. That’s quite a list!

If you start with English, you can get to any of the other 26 languages, but the assumption that all 27 languages can be translated into all of the other languages is incorrect. Urdu and Russian, for example, can only be translated into English, while Spanish can only be translated into Arabic, English, and French. As far as I can tell, Cellictica Oy, the creators of Trippo Mondo, have selected the most likely language pairs, and done a complete job with translating English.

I also tested Trippo Mondo with several languages that use non-Roman character sets, like Russian, Hindi, Hebrew, and Chinese. While I could not verify the accuracy of the spoken phrases in each language, I could see that the character sets of the target languages was being used in the displays. For example, here is the Russian translation of the same phrase:

Non-Roman character sets appear in the appropriate target languages.

Overall, Trippo Mondo is a great way to make oneself understood to someone who speaks a different language. I might note that one does not have to be a world traveler for this application to be useful.

Sometimes, the world is already at your door. I live in San Francisco, California, for example. In our bay area, the prevailing languages include English, Spanish, Chinese, Russian, Tagalog, Hindi, Japanese, and Vietnamese, and that’s not counting the tourists.

I mentioned earlier that Trippo Mondo is not the ‘perfect’ translation application, and the reason for that did not have to do with the accuracy of its translations. It has to do with the fact that conversation is a two-way street, and there is no mechanism for non-Roman character sets to be entered onto my Nokia N97. So, while I can ask a question of others in 26 foreign languages, the responses of others using non-roman character sets cannot be typed into my device for reverse translation.

This is not an insurmountable problem,  because devices with non-Roman or dual-character set capabilities are sold around the world by Nokia. Nokia devices from other regions may perform the reverse functions that my Nokia N97 cannot. Psiloc, for example, has created many dual-character-set keyboard mappings that enables such conversions.

Trippo Mondo is available for both Nokia Series 40 and Nokia S60 devices for $4.99 (USD) in Ovi Store.