Celebrate St. Patrick’s Day using a free Irish translator on your smart phone

To celebrate St. Patrick’s Day and Seachtain na Gaeilge, Maithu, a small Irish company, has launched two FREE Irish language applications for the iPhone and Google Android App stores.

The 'Get the Focal Irish Translator' is a two way Irish-English, English-Irish Translator with a database of over 13,000 words and terms which live in your pocket. It is quick and accurate, can be used for completing that Irish assignment, reading articles as Gaeilge, or filling in a ‘cúpla focal’ here and there. If you're looking for help with speaking Irish, Muithu also offers a full version which contains pronunciations for all translations.

According to Kerrill Thornhill, “We launched the free version of the 'Get the Focal' app for the iPhone and Android app stores about 6 days ago, there have been over 350 downloads of the free app to date: 280 on the iPhone, over 70 on Android. The paid version of the 'Get the Focal' app was launched in September last year. There have been several hundred downloads of the paid app to date, generating reports from iTunes account is not very user friendly so that's about as accurate as I can be at the moment.”

Kerrill tells me you can download the iPhone version here. I tried it, it is indeed very easy to use.

You might try it for your next speech at South Boston’s Saint Patrick’s Day pre-parade political roast. The best received speaker on Sunday was Gerry Adams, Sinn Fein president, who spoke of the long struggle for peace in Northern Ireland, opening and closing his remarks in Irish.

“We want equality. We want peace, we would not have progress, which we’re making in the process back home, if it wasn’t for the encouragement, assistance, and support of people here,’’ said Adams, who received two standing ovations.

Go raibh míle maith agat, (Thanks a mil), to Kerrill for this free app.

Bad joke: Back when the Irish Tiger was growling loudly, some wits suggested that Ireland was indeed becoming bilingual: English and Polish. Now that the recession has reduced immigration; we might need a new joke.