Have you ever had one of those days when you ask a complete stranger in a foreign land where the bathroom is, then they give you is a sly look and push you wordlessly to the nearest capsule hotel, and the next morning you wake up and find out you've got the clap? Yeah, we hate that. Fortunately, now that the PSP Talkman's available for purchase here in the States, we'll no longer have that problem. Heck, we may look like dweebs brandishing our PSPs for all to see, but at least we won't be unintelligible!Numerous listings have popped up on eBay, and it's also available for purchase at that persistent purveyor of polygonal pathos, Lik-Sang.
The Talkman is primarily a language interpreter program, although there is an included trainer feature. The application can understand English, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean (although specific dialects for each have been imprecise), and can translate your phrases into any of these languages for playback. Archetypal anime characters help out the process by visualizing your phrases: Ask for directions to a restaurant and the screen will display one for you. The translation abilities of the Talkman are somewhat limited given that it doesn't actually generate a real-time translation, only a pre-recorded one. So I was understandably disappointed that my dream of asking, "Where is the Takashi Miike film festival?" wasn't going to be visualized into a cartoony, blood-stained theatre filled with animated gibs.
While not an official release, region coding hasn't been much of a problem for the PSP, so chances are even imported Talkmans (Talkmen?) will work fine on machines this side of the Pacific.
