Found In Translation

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Searching for a bathroom in Tokyo but don't speak Japanese? You can stop flipping frantically through that Berlitz dictionary and fumbling with awkward pronunciations. An easier solution is now as close as your Apple iPod, thanks to a new set of foreign-language programs available from an online service at talkingpanda.com.

Talking Panda's software can be downloaded into the iPod. It provides more than 300 commonly used phrases, which are instantly organized into categories such as "dining," "shopping," "emergency" and "making friends." You can access the needed phrase in English using the touch-wheel scroll device and then clicking on the sentence you want. The translation appears on the screen and is also recited clearly through your headphones.

Downloads are cheap — just $10 each — but so far language options are limited to French, Spanish and Japanese. And the software works only on new, third-generation iPods using Mac OS X version 10.2 or later (a Windows version is promised soon). Guess the translation for all that is C'est la vie.