By Andrew Liszewski

I try to travel as light as possible, particularly when it comes to gadgets. And while I’ve never needed a translator, this one seems to include enough functionality to make it worth tossing in the carry-on bag. Not only can it translate in both directions from any of the 20 supported languages (including English, Arabic, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovakian, Spanish and Turkish) but it’s also able to speak the translation on your behalf if you’re afraid of butchering the pronunciation. It can also speak over 46,000 commonly used phrases from around the world which hopefully includes the basics like “Please point me towards the (insert country) consulate, I did not know it was loaded!”

Other functions include an FM radio, various travel games, a voice/memo recorder, a 200 city world time clock with alarms, a calendar, a 12-digit calculator and a currency converter. There’s also a headphone jack for privately listening to the spoken translations and it runs on 2 AAA batteries which should be pretty easy to replace no matter where you are. X-Treme Geek.com has it for $249.

[ Lingo Voyager 5 Talking Translator ] VIA [ IT Rush ]

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