What the focal?

Posted by maca on May 11, 2008 Leave a comment (6) Go to comments

It’s Get the focal!

It’s not often I’d pay any attention to the ads in gmail but this one just caught my attention. It’s Get the focal, an Irish-English-Irish translator for your mobile phone created by a company called Maithú. It has 10k words and is bound to come in handy when you’re stuck for the odd word.

You can get the application by texting Focal to 53503 (Irish & UK mobiles), visiting m.getthefocal.com on your mobile or just download them to your PC via the following links: English-Irish, Irish-English [both *.jar files].

EDIT: I failed to do my duty before posting about this application, apologies for that dear reader. This application isn’t free as I found out after I posted about it; you need to pay €5 for a 1 year licence for each of the jar files. I bought a licence for the English-Irish dictionary and have tested it; and while it’s handy to have I certainly don’t think it’s worth €5!

So here’s an alternative:
Opera mini for cheap web browsing and an online English-Irish dictionary.

Gaeilge,
Leave a comment

6 Comments.

  1. Antonio May 12, 2008 at 9:16 am

    I think it could be more handy for tourists, but tourists don’t have Irish mobiles, so they have to stick to the old pocket dictionary :)

  2. maca May 12, 2008 at 1:08 pm

    better off with a pocket dictionary anyway, I have been testing this dictionary and am not impressed. I just wasted €5.

  3. Rhys May 18, 2008 at 10:47 am

    interesting, there’s a similar one for Welsh called Geiryn: http://geiryn.com/ devised by a Welsh learner from Yorkshire.

  4. maca May 19, 2008 at 1:01 pm

    Hi Rhys, is it any good? At least it is free anyway!

    I have been using the Irish one and it’s actually very poor. So instead i’ve started to use the online translator instead which is probably slightly more expensive if i were to use it VERY often but gives far far better results.

  5. Rhys May 19, 2008 at 10:42 pm

    Sadly, my phones to old to use it so,couldn’t say sorry (so guess me post a comment here was a bit pointless sorry :-) ).

    But, as as you say, it’s free, and the creator shares the code with anyone who wants it, so if you know your stuff the info might be handy if you want to create your own, and charge E4 for it and undercut the other guy.

  6. maca May 20, 2008 at 4:19 pm

    Not at all Rhys, at least it gets the link out there, others might see it.

    Not a bad idea about creating my own but deciphering the code might be a bit over my head. :)