What is a good portable language translator device?

None, they are a waste of money. Even if you show the people what the screen says they still don't understand you.What is a good portable language translator device?
a pocket dictionary :)What is a good portable language translator device?
There is no such thing.



Machine translation sucks. You can get translations of simple sentences. Anything more complex or figurative will be at best awkward, at worst (and more commonly) incoherent.



Moreover, most devices sold as "translators" aren't. They aren't even decent dictionaries. Almost every device sold as a "translator," particularly those that do multiple languages, just returns a word for whatever word you enter. They don't even give definitions or other indications of what word is the right one.



I do recall reading about a "translator" being developed for the military that would be able to handle simple sentences, but they're still using interpreters, so I'm guessing it didn't go far. (Also, phrasebooks are easier to deploy)



If you're looking for an electronic dictionary, the things you want to look for are FULL TEXT dictionaries. As in the electronic dictionary contains the full text of a good paper dictionary. Also you want to see how well the jump feature works. That's the ability to highlight a word in one dictionary (say, Korean-English) and jump to an entry for that word in another dictionary (English-Korean).



Jump used to be a high-end feature, but now it's pretty standard...but the ease of use of the feature varies.



Also, for some languages (notably Chinese and Japanese), you may want to make sure that you can always find the reading for characters you don't know. Many dictionaries are made only for native speakers of those languages, without foreign speakers in mind, so they don't offer any help in that regard.



I have never seen a good electronic dictionary sell for less than 100 dollars. Ever. Most are 2-300. (Actually, for something like Spanish they might be cheaper, but I only shop for less common stuff myself)What is a good portable language translator device?
Definitely a pocket dictionary.