The Big Review


The Franklin Euro Interpreter puts over 400,000 words and phrases for 12 languages, in your pocket.

Does this mean you can now start talking like a local and avoid all those embarrassing situations that the language barrier can cause?

I take the Franklin Euro Interpreter to Nice, south of France to test it out. Find out if it gets the “oui” or “non” from the unsuspecting French locals I try it out on…

What is it?

The Franklin Euro Interpreter is a handheld, battery-powered device allowing you to translate to and from 12 European languages.

The Franklin Euro Interpreter come rather charmingly shaped like a little book, and then when opened, one half has the screen, the other half has a QWERTY keyboard.

What languages can you translate?

English
French
German
Spanish
Dutch
Italian
Portuguese
Russian
Czech
Hungarian
Polish
Turkish

Features

Single word translations — type your word for translation
Phrase database — Search thousands of popular phrases
Databank — stores up to 100 names and contact numbers (with a password protection feature too)
Setting local times — you can set your home time, and then see what time it is in over 45 other cities.
Converter — allows you to easily convert currency and measurements
Calculator — You know what these do.
Games — Test your language skills.

What are the technical specifications?

Battery Type 1 x CR-2032 lithium (included)
Size 4.84 x 6.06 x 0.67 in
Weight 6.4 oz

Basically it is pocket-sized, and a little bit heavier than you’d think by looking at it, but not so much as to make it uncomfortable to carry.

Once opened the screen is easy to read, and the keyboard easy to use (at least for my eyesight and finger size).

Setting it up:

Being male, the moment I received my Franklin Euro Interpreter, I discarded the instructions and went ahead relying on my male intuition.

Within a few seconds I had managed to set the default language to Spanish — whoops!

Luckily, Spanish is the one foreign language that I have some sort of knowledge of and with a little trial and error, I managed to get the default language switched back to English. A language in which I claim to be slightly more proficient.

The big test — using the Franklin Translator in Nice, south of France

I had chance to use the Franklin Translator on my recent trip to Nice, South of France. This is a city I’ve visited many times and now know my way around quite well.

Despite this, and despite learning the language at school, my French is terrible (which is the same word in French as it is in English, as the translator has just told me).

Before now, my efforts at speaking French were generally confined to speaking a bit louder in English, and making more gestures with my arms. If the worst came to the worst, I’d try the word in Spanish.

Not this time however,
Armed with my Franklin 12-Language Translator I was determined to give this French-lark a go…

The Franklin Translator has two main ways you can translate. The first and quickest method is to translate single words by typing the word in English then hitting enter. It will then search its memory for suitable matches. For example, when I typed in “date”, I had to specify if I meant date as in time, or date as in a romantic encounter, or date as in the fruit etc.

Then the translated word would appear. I found this feature very easy to use and very useful in situations like shopping for specific items.

The second translation feature is searching for phrases. The Franklin Translator comes programmed with thousands of common phrases, however they’re all preset. This means that you cannot just type a phrase that comes into your head, instead you must search for a category (e.g. Emergencies, Travel and Directions, Hotel, Shopping etc.), and then search through all the suggested phrases for one that fits what you want to say.

This created two problems for me.

Firstly, it’s not always obvious which category you should begin your search in, so it can take a few minutes of searching. This is obviously a disadvantage if you’re in a hurry, for example getting onto a bus to speak to the driver with a big queue behind you.

Secondly, if you couldn’t find the exact phrase you needed, you had to “mix and match” between phrases. For example, I wanted to ask the question “Is there a pet store near here?”. To do this I had to search through a few of the phrase categories until I eventually stumbled upon “I am looking for…” in the Shopping section. Then I had to switch to translating single words to find “pet” and “store”. Luckily the person I was asking was patient, but it did make it a bit complicated.

This said, once I had used the phrases categories a few times, I started to remember where certain of the more useful phrases were listed, so getting to them was much quicker. Plus, I started to ask the question without the need of the translator at all. Yes reader, I was speaking French!

Two further considerations

Although the Franklin Euro Interpreter will show you what to say, it doesn’t tell you how to say it, so you still may find yourself hard to be understood. For example, I’m very aware that Portuguese is spoken very differently to how it is written.

Also, asking a question in a foreign language is only one half of it. You need to understand the answer too, and unless you switch the languages over and get your new foreign friend to translate their answer back to you, you may still be non the wiser. For example, in Mexico City I needed to find the office of the airline I was flying. Now Mexican Spanish is very rapid fire, certainly too rapid for me. So, I developed a tactic of asking as many people as I encountered and instead of trying to understand, I would just notice what direction they pointed in and walked that way until I found someone else, and did the same. Eventually I pinpointed the office!

Conclusions

Despite some of the drawbacks I’ve mentioned above, I found having the Franklin Euro Interpreter very useful, as without it I would have been even more stuck.

I also found that the locals really did open up to me more when they could see I was trying, and some of them were fascinated by the translator itself.

Although I won’t rely on my Franklin Euro Interpreter to get me speaking like a local, I will certainly take it every time I’m visiting a country with a language it supports.

To learn more about the Franklin Euro Interpreter click here