Product Description

12 Language Translator (English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Russian, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, and Turkish.

Product Details

• Brand: Franklin Electronics
• Model: TG-450
• Dimensions: 2.25" h x 8.00" w x 11.25" l, .54 pounds

Features

• Electronic translator with 400,000+ words and phrases in 12 languages
• 12 languages: Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish
• Compact, pocket-sized design for maximum portability
• In-built currency and metric converter make difficult conversions easy
• Advanced spell correction

Amazon.com Product Description
The Franklin TG-450 12 Language Translator is an indispensable tool when traveling or taking language classes. It is able to translate between 12 different languages--Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish. In addition to over 400,000 words and phrases and 317,000 inflections, the translator also features a metric and currency converter. It also has a compact, pocket-sized design allowing you to take it anywhere you go.

What's in the Box
TG-450 translator, two CR-2032 batteries, hard cover lid, and full manuals in English, Spanish, French and Dutch.

Customer Reviews

Easy operation, but limited.
I completed one year of college French years ago and I am using this device for review and to assist my learning of Spanish and Portuguese. This review is from this perspective.

The Franklin TG-450 does what it says it does and is easy to use. Anyone who is familiar with various interfaces of electronic devices will find the operation of this device simple and intuitive. The buttons are a mix of icons, words, and the typical QWERTY keyboard. Accessing numbers, mathematical functions, and the Cyrillic alphabet is as easy as shifting on a typical keyboard. Scrolling within menus is accomplished with four large direction buttons and selecting is a matter of pressing 'Enter'.

Translating is very easy and the Franklin TG-450 is able to translate a misspelled word with a close match or several close matches. The database contains quite a few words and although the phrases are of the typical tourist variety, their idioms can be applied to many phrases with a bit of knowledge.

A calculator, a currency converter, and a databank for the user's personal information and contacts (so that a PDA or similar device isn't necessary along with the translator) is geared toward the traveler.
Setting up the clock, languages, contrast, shutoff time, type size, and message language (the language the device uses to communicate with the user) are all very easy to setup.

A few complaints:

Obviously, a device like this cannot include all common words and phrases, but as other reviewers have mentioned, some of the choices that have ommitted very common words are odd. Instead of offering 12 languages, I would rather the Franklin TG-450 included, say, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian, thus being able to more robustly translate words and phrases of all languages offered.

Toggling between the target language and the home language ('To'/'From') is as simple as pressing a button, but changing to a new language is sometimes annoying. Scrolling through the languages is not alphabetical and their stored order seems randomly chosen. If your 'From' language is English and your 'To' language is French, you might want to switch to French/English and this is easy -- just press the translator button again. However, if you want to switch from, say, English/French to French/Spanish, you cannot change the 'From' selection in this case to French becuase French is already the 'To' selection and the Franklin TG-450 does not allow itself to be French/French (the same language for 'To'/'From') at any time, even in the Setup menu.

Nouns do not include whether they are masculine or feminine and tenses are not specified. The unconjugated root verb is displayed and translated no matter what form is entered. Including this information wouldn't have taken much more space in the database and would be very useful because in many languages, one needs to know these things in order to use the translated word in a sentence (subject agreement, articles, etc.).

I found the games to be of no use whatsoever and will likely not use the databank, so I wish they had not been included and the space occupied by more robust translation.

I LOVE this thing!
We have a girl from Russia staying with us this summer and this thing has been invaluable! I really am surprised that some others have given it a bad review. I'd say 95% of the words that we have looked up have been found. It is a great little tool that is very easy to use. Anyone considering buying a translator should seriously consider this. It is a great buy!

Franklin TG 450-insufficient
Unfortunately, you can't find even some easy words though you can find some advanced words sometimes.It's interesting. I entered 10 normal words and unfortunately it couldn't find all of them but half of it.The possibility to find the word is around 50%.So, it's not so useful for a researcher.You have to look up half of the words again sometimes.
But, for travel purposes and some daily phrases it's ok.and 12 language feature is great. I wish this product contained more words.