Why the far half of the screen is upside down
Better Translate Team ·
Put a phone flat on a table between two people and one of them is reading upside
down. Most translation apps solve that by making you pass the phone. We rotated half the screen
instead.
What the rotation fixes
Your half faces you. The far half is turned 180 degrees so the person opposite reads it the right
way up and answers on their own side. Both halves are live at the same time.
The thing this removes is the handover. Passing a phone to a stranger is a small social
transaction that happens every single turn of the conversation, and it is the part that makes people
give up and use gestures. Nobody has to hold your phone. Nobody has to lean.
The one thing it costs
There is one microphone. One side talks at a time, and we say so rather than implying otherwise.
Two people speaking simultaneously into one phone is not a solved problem and pretending it is would
just produce two bad transcripts.
In practice a conversation is turn-taking anyway. What it is not is phone-passing.
The small decision underneath it
Each half also carries its own language, set once. That is why the app holds two languages rather
than a list: a screen split in half has exactly two halves, and each one belongs to one person
reading one language. A five-language picker would be a worse version of the same screen.