I had the chance to interview UncleMiF of Translate It. They have recently released a mac version of their software.

Why did you want to make a translating program for Mac?

First of all, I’m not a professional interpreter. I’m just an ordinary man who likes reading
English and French sites, articles and news.
And I have some problems with translating and understanding some foreign words.
My mother language is Russian, my second language is French which I’ve studied at school and
university, and my third language is English (I study it by myself.)
I also like to communicate with foreign people to ask them about happenings in other countries
of the world, to talk IT-related topics, etc. After migrating to the Mac platform I wanted to
improve my command in foreign languages… I liked StarDict project on Linux, but I wanted to
have a native Mac OS X app for reading StarDict-compatible dictionaries on my Mac. However,
I’ve found no solution that would have been good enough for me: StarDict has no native Mac OS X
ports, and in X11, it has very unstable behavior, it is almost
useless. So I decided to create MDict (’M’ comes from my nick name MiF) for Mac. After a year
of developing the software has been re-branded to TranslateIt!.

Now TI! has many tools for convenient foreign language learning:

1. History with the Word Quiz add-on
2. Double sided cards printing tool
3. Translation on the fly
4. Notes
5. TI Dashboard Widget
6. Users are able to make their own dictionaries using the built-in DictBuilder utility.

Who do you see using TranslateIt?

I think it may be useful for many people. First of all, it is used by professional translators,
software localizers, philologists, students and those who want to learn a foreign language. Next,
it’s used by the rest of us simply for reading foreign sites or emails from time to time, or for
chatting with foreign friends. With a good and fast dictionary like TI! it becomes easy to
discover the world and find new friends anywhere in it. For example, my friend Zac from Acqualia
company (located in Australia) has visited Moscow recently during his trip, and we have met and
had a great time together. TI! is the offline dictionary, so it is very useful even in places
where no Internet access is available.

When did you start developing for the Mac?

I started developing for the Mac in 2005 after I’d switched to Mac from Gentoo Linux.
Now I’m teaching students at our university generic Mac OS X technologies and Objective-C & Cocoa programming.

What’s your current “setup”?

A: In our labs, we have: an old PowerMac G4 (1GGz Dual Processor, 728 Mb RAM) with
Tiger installed for OSX 10.4 backward compatibility tests, a PowerBook G4 12″ (1.5 Gb RAM)
with Leopard, a MacBook Pro 15″ Intel Core 2 Duo, a Mac mini Intel Core Duo, an iMac 20″
Intel Core 2 Duo with dual display for multi-screen tests, and fifteen 20? iMacs for our students and developers.

So there you have it, UncleMiF of Translate It.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 13th, 2008 at 8:58 pm and is filed under Interviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.