I'm a lover of languages, but it can be really daunting to go to a new country, even though it's the best way to learn.
Mantaphrase breaks down that barrier.
"Puis-je avoir le menu encore, s'il vous plaît ?" is a word for word translation of english. Unfortunately, "encore" needs to be put before the complement and the correct form would be : "Puis-je encore avoir le menu, s'il vous plaît ?". And even like this, it still sound phoney and using "à nouveau" would be better. French tends to be more tricky than english as its rules of construction admit a lot of irregularities.
I don't know how they get the translation. Apparently, they have a set of sentences translated "by hand". Well, if I was them, I wouldn't be too prompt to criticised machine translation as they do on their home page. Google Translate got the sentence they failed right. With a huge corpus (Google uses the European parliament translations if I remember correctly) and proper alignment, the result can be pretty awesome. Google Translate is now really awesome for European language and will probably give as good if not better results than a phrase book but I don't know how good it is for Asian languages.
Did someone compare both Google Translate and Mantaphrase for Japanese or Chinese ? Of course, Mantaphrase still has the advantage that it can work offline.
For major European languages. Try something like Lithuanian and you'll most likely get something completely wrong.
http://velocity.uwaterloo.ca/velocity-startups/mantaphrase-l...
"From those visits, we had 3,200 users initiate 13,000 conversations powered by Mantaphrase."
Somehow, I'd have expected more conversations per user. Any insight as to how many casual versus frequent users you've ended up with?
http://www.google.com/mobile/translate/
Does Mantaphrase work offline? I think Translate requires a data connection.
I can't really think of another use case, though.
From what I can tell, it's the modern equivalent of a 'phrase book', which makes sense and is a pretty good idea, imo.
As someone else has posted, it would be interesting to know how many users are out there actually using it in the real world. The statistics seem to suggest that there have been a lot of people download it and play with it a few times.