apps
Transfire iOS app translates your chat messages for you
Short of heading to Google Translate and manually translating everything yourself, there’s now a free app on iOS called Transfire which apparently automatically translates your Google Chat messages into the language you have set up for your friends/co-workers. So if you have Japanese co-workers whom you communicate with on a daily basis, you can set their language to Japanese, and the text you send to them in English will automatically converted on their end.
When they respond to your messages in Japanese, it will then be translated back to English when you receive it, or whichever default language that you have set for yourself. It even features Phonetic Transliteration that will sound out and pronounced the translated message, and apparently it even comes with the proper accents.
It seems to work only for Google Chat, which we’re assuming connects and grabs its translations from Google Translate. We can’t speak for how accurate the app is, but if you’re interested go download it as it is free, but given that these automated translations end up being too literal sometimes, well, expect some embarrassing but sometimes amusing conversations.