Speak in French: Mantaphrase, an app that enables language foreign conversation

"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).

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.

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.

Made in Waterloo ;)

http://velocity.uwaterloo.ca/velocity-startups/mantaphrase-l...

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

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.

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.

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

Does the app work offline?

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