Interviews with developers TranslateIt

Not so long ago a new version of the program TranslateIt! Deluxe 9.5 for Mac. A good excuse to chat with product developers. On MacRadar questions are answered by Alexey Galygin, software architect.

TranslateIt now available for Windows and Mac. Do you have any plans to create a version for the iPhone? What is your attitude to the App Store?

Yes. There are plans. Unfortunately, the App Store is not yet available to us (for Russian companies), as well as the iPhone itself is not officially available for the Russians.

Now access to the App Store can get only a small percentage of companies, and only on the territory of the USA.

By the App Store yet treat with caution. The idea is good, but... Control "big brother" in each stage is not very happy.

As things stand now, with the support of morphology? Previously, users had noticed that stemming quite slow - in simple words were required to wait 5-7 seconds. And at that time it was impossible to continue the collection of words.

We are already half a year as a promising stream passed to the engine. So you can always interrupt the search, and it does not prevent recruitment. Speed ​​and stability in recent versions has also been significantly improved.

Which way now goes TranslateIt development? Are there any plans to add new dictionaries and the rejection of the synthesized voice of words?

The next version will be a full-fledged editor of dictionaries, planned to be added in fast converter dictionaries formats XDXF, SDICT - which represent a huge vocabulary base. Already without long DictBuilder process converts any Windows-based version TranslateIt dictionaries! and dictionaries from Apple Dictionary 10.5 (And as compressed and encoded). If you look at our TODO list, the ideas for the implementation will last for many years.

The synthesized voice is designed to fill the initial absence of a human voice.

However, we also have a human voice. On the official site for a long time are some voice packets.

Add a custom voice acting is also not too difficult (if only to have the desired sound files).

The situation on the market of dictionary for Mac OS is quite interesting. Large developers do not show a strong interest in - "Linguistic" for "Mack" No MultiLex stopped at version 1.0 (as of version 5.0 is available for Windows). What is, in your opinion can be explained? The market is so small that it is not interesting?

These companies tied to the Russian market. We do not limit ourselves to the Russo * directions. Set dictionaries depends on the willingness of users and databases available on the Internet. From my point of view, Lingvo chose the wrong way to port their product under Mac (as they have such extreme ideas) it follows from the list of demands of the recent job search Mac-programmer of the company... who have seen and understand job will laugh. Plus - experienced Russian programmers for Mac in our country is very small... So it turns out that MultiLex seem abandoned, and have no real interest in Lingvo and / or the necessary expertise.

We have a wider market. If necessary, we support the Russian-German-French-English-speaking users in their native languages.

We love our work and, especially, Macintosh platform, so we're interested to continue to develop in all circumstances.

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Alex, thank you very much for your answers.