Quick, how do you ask for coffee with milk in Dutch? What’s the Chinese word for subway? How do you order a taxicab in Polish? If your travel destinations mean you’ll need answers to all those questions and more, the 12-Language Global Translator from Franklin Electronic Publishers is worth looking into.

According to the publisher, the unit can translate more than 400,000 words and 12,000 phrases in 12 languages. This includes nine European languages (Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish) plus three Asian languages (Chinese, Japanese and Korean). For the Asian languages, the translation is given in the relevant language characters, but also phonetically using roman characters. For example, looking up the Korean translation for “street map” displays Korean characters as well as the word “sikato.”

At 77 x 122 x 18 mm (3 x 4.75 x 0.75 inches), the US$99.95 device is about the same size as those paperback phrase books you might find in a bookstore. That makes it easy to tuck away in your pocket or handbag. The unit’s hard plastic shell is even styled to look like a little hardcover book, and being digital, the single Global Translator handles the translation duties for a dozen different languages.
When open, the translator could easily be mistaken for a digital organizer. It’s a basic clamshell design with a qwerty keyboard and a character-based monochrome screen connected by a hinge. The screen is very simple, almost primitive, being neither backlit nor graphical. However, that keeps power requirements low, so the unit runs off a single CR2032 button battery - and besides, for word translation, all you need to display is text. And even though the screen isn’t backlit, the large characters are easy to see even in very dim light.

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