Franklin TG-450 12 Language Translator

I was sooooo excited to receive the Franklin TG-450 12 Language Translator, that as soon as it came in the mail, I immediately opened it and followed the instructions to begin using this language translator. Boy was I surprised when NONE of the words of phrases I typed in the translator to be translated from English to German were in there! Simple words like eat, bathroom, dog, cat.... you know, the things we need to find our way in another country! Well, needless to say, I returned the product the very next day and I guess I will be going to Germany without a language translator--wish me luck!

I bought this as a Christmas present for my husband who loves to do the New York Times crossword puzzles. For this purpose, he says it's a great translator. I was not needing it for travelling so cannot rate it for that purpose, but it certainly can be great for other uses!

I bought this translator to my wife for initial studies and at first use she tried to translate a simple sentence from Portuguese to English. It did not work. Of course it could be a difficult one, ok, tried once again with a simpler sentence. Once more the device took a long time to say "cannot help". Then she tried to use simple words and in about 10 tries it found 2 or 3 words and it was very difficult to understand their meanings, as the device proposed a lot of possible matches which did not even have to do with the word she typed. As I am proficient in both languages I tried myself. I stopped after a few tries, as the results were getting worse. It does not seem the internal dictionary is poor, but the matching algorithm is not smart enough for this device. It takes a long time to identify it cannot help on the required translation and it does not help on very basic sentences, which was the first need of my wife. I returned the product and fortunately Amazon had gave me back the money with no issues. I was looking for something cheap and useful, but it was only cheap. Might help on other languages, but I guess newer devices might help more who need it for studying.

I got this for my boyfriend who dabbles in a number of European languages but is fluent in none. I thought the simple vocabulary would supplement what he already knows and help him figure things out without flipping through a dictionary.So far it hasn't proven to be very useful. The vocabulary of this gadget isn't too small, but it's remarkably strange. I tried looking up a few relatively simple conversational terms in Russian and got no results for several of them. Then I jokingly tried "sausage" and got upwards of 10 results, mostly dishes made with sausage and different kinds of sausage. So, not too useful but could be nice if you're eating out in a foreign country. Maybe that's what they were going for?As far as ease of use goes, it's simple enough. The little games are sort of nice for people learning languages. I've been using the hangman game to practice my Russian spelling.Overall: I wouldn't recommend it very highly. You get what you pay for and nothing more.

If you need very basic expressions and vocabulary and you need to translate into different languages, then this may be for you.I purchased this as an economical German-, Dutch-, French-, and Spanish - English dictionary (It has 12 languages in all). With this I can look up some very common words - and I can see expressions using those words to boot. This is very nice and convenient for me.Sadly, I tend to be fairly demanding of translators and will frequently come across words that most electronic dictionaries don't have. The word reminiscence - or anything like it is not there, for example and there are many such examples you will find. {For this, I will use more elaborate electronic dictionaries, or better yet, a big book!}For those of us who use the Russian dictionary: The Russian keyboard is inconvenient, to put it mildly! Picture a standard keyboard but not QWERTY, rather ABCDEF. I think it would drive most of us nuts. (The ENGLISH keyboard is perfectly normal). On the postive side, the translator DOES offer Russian!All-in-all, for the price and for translating into many, many languages, I think it is pretty good. If you're going to travel to many different countries and you need info on those languages, I think you'll like this. I do. If you're a native English speaker like me and you're about to read War and Peace in the original Russian, you REALLY need to look elsewhere!

This unit can help you get by, but you'll be much better off with a higher end talking model.Very limited vocabulary (at least in Polish), does not recognize many common words. Tenses confuse it, as does use of a word as a modifier.No phonetic cues, limited use for Slavic languages for sure.If you have a laptop, netbook, Windows mobile platform, smart phone, or Palm device, look at the Lingvosoft talking software available right here on Amazon. It works really well.

Good service and not a bad price either. Well satisfied with price as well as quality of merchandise. They produced what they promised.

I bought the Franklin TG-450 12 Language Translator for my wife. She is taking spanish classes and didn't want to carry a dictionary in her purse. Once we got the package in the mail, we quickly realized that the language translator was of little use. It doesn't conjugate words since it only gives you the orignal stem. Moreover, its lack of vocabulary is unimpressive. We had to refer to the dictionary 9 out of 10 times when looking for a word. It now collects dust on our book shelf. If you are serious about learning a language, either buy a more expensive translator or a pocket dictionary.