Franklin TWE-118 5 Language European Translator

List Price: $39.99 Discount Price: $15.59

Features:

• 210,000 translations to and from English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish
• 5,000 categorized conversational phrases
• Spell checking
• Hangman and Quiz games
• Also a calculator, clock, and contact information databank

Accessories:

Moleskine Small Ruled Notebook

Customer Reviews:

Good Value for the Money [Posted on 2003-03-12]
This handy little translator is worth the price. It's not the best in the world, but it will handle the basics. I found the dictionary to be somewhat limited, so you may need to familiarize yourself with the language of the country you are visiting. I would recommend you do that anyway, though.

Note: Cannot withstand being dropped with the weight of a backpack full of books on top of it. I'm buying my second one.

Good only for the basics [Posted on 2006-01-16]
The translator lacks of plurals and genders. If you have not background at all of the foreign language (including pronunciation), this translator is not much help.

Next to Useless [Posted on 2006-05-23]
A couple of years ago I bought a Franklin Spanish-English dictionary (DBE-1470AM) before going to Mexico and it worked great for deciphering written signs, menus, etc. So I thought I would get something to help me before going to Germany this summer, and this is the Franklin product that appeared to best fit the bill.

As compared to the DBE-1470AM, this product:
* Has a miniscule display which makes it very hard to see descriptions
* Has very minimal text for descriptions
* Doesn't conjugate verbs (see below)
* Doesn't provide gender information
* Has a smallish dictionary - uncommon but still used words, e.g. "dolphin", are often missing.

The absence of verb forms renders this device next to useless for people unfamiliar with the source language. As a simple example, in English, if you look up the various forms of the verb "say" you get:
* "Say" - found, with a description
* "Said" - not found
* "Says" - corrected to "see" (!)
* "Saying" - This is my favorite, since it provides the noun "saying" and the phrase "That goes without saying", but not the verb "saying" that's used in the phrase it provides!

I haven't tried the languages other than German and English, so there's a chance they're better but, at least for German and English, if you want to use this device to decipher written words, you'll be unsuccessful.

Unfortunately, I haven't get found another translator to buy so I can't recommend anything else; I can only recommend not buying this product.

OK for the money, but.... [Posted on 2006-08-07]
This product is very reasonably priced, however, it certainly does not measure up to the product description. In particular, the Euro converter did not work for me (or it was just to un-user friendly). Also many needed words and phrases were not found.

twe-1185 [Posted on 2007-01-09]
It is not user freindly and very complicated. I am not happy with it. I even had help trying to decifer it. Bad investment. By the way I am 74 and computer literate, learned computers begining in 1970"s.

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