The automatic translator for Czech and Ukrainian, recently developed at the Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics (ÚFAL) of Charles University, is now also available as a mobile application for Android. Users can download the Charles Translator for Ukraine app free of charge from the Google Play store.
The translator was developed with support of LINDAT/CLARIAH-CZ, and runs on the LINDAT technical infrastructure. It was developed in record time after the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent wave of refugees into the Czech Republic, and it has been freely available for non-commercial purposes since mid-March at https://translator.cuni.cz. The web service has logged almost a quarter of a million hits in April, which, together with the demand from owners of smart mobile devices running Android, has triggered the development of a mobile application.
The application allows translation between Czech and Ukrainian in both audio and text form, and phonetic transcriptions between Latin and Cyrillic are available for translations.
The release of the mobile application is a significant event in the historical context of research and development of machine translation at the ÚFAL and also at LINDAT/CLARIAH-CZ. The importance of this moment was enhanced by the introduction of the new name of the Czech-Ukrainian translation system Charles Translator for Ukraine, thereby subscribing to the brand name Charles University. With the addition of translation pairs of languages, the name should be narrowed down to Charles Translator in the future, allowing the researchers from ÚFAL to combine this new translator, developed in connection with the war in Ukraine, with the existing translation service available in LINDAT for other languages.