Translators

When translation apps are a dime a dozen, don't waste your time testing them. Download SayHi Translate and use it at home or on your next trip abroad. It's just as useful for business as it is for leisure travel. Name: SayHi Translate Available for: iPhone, iPod touch, iPad What it does: Interprets 32 languages and dialects. Speak into the device and watch as your words appear in the conversation box. You select the language, and the translation is then spoken.

GLASGOW, Scotland - The other passengers aboard the late-night Greyhound bus weren't looking to get their kicks on route M6. Mostly they were just hoping to catch some Z's. They settled in their seats, some of them sprawled across entire rows, drawing their coats over their heads and shutting out the rest of the world. Most of them would stay that way throughout the eight-hour ride from Glasgow to London, oblivious to their surroundings - and the fact that they were among the last to experience a bit of Americana transplanted to Britain.

How do you convey to the world the American ideal of free speech or curious turns of phrase like "stump speech" and "gerrymandering"? Abderrahim Foukara does it daily, as Al Jazeera's bureau chief in Washington. I first met the Moroccan-born journalist at the 2008 Republican convention, where he told me that he had explained John McCain as "maverick" to his Arab-language audiences as a bird that flies a distance from the flock. Now, at a parlous moment in the relationship between there and here, I asked the man who reports U.S. thinking to the Arab world to do some illuminating in the other direction.

Marvin W. Meyer, an expert on Gnosticism and ancient texts about Jesus outside the New Testament who challenged the traditional portrayal of Judas Iscariot as the ultimate biblical villain, has died. He was 64. Meyer, whose book "The Gospel of Judas" sold more than 1.2 million copies and prompted frequent guest appearances on television documentaries and other programs, died Aug. 16 of complications from melanoma, according to his wife, Bonnie. The tanned, athletic man who wore rumpled khakis, oversized shirts and a silver hoop in his left ear "was our Indiana Jones," said James L. Doti, president of Chapman University in Orange, where Meyer held the Griset Chair in Bible and Christian Studies and was director of the Albert Schweitzer Institute.

JERUSALEM - Mitt Romney has rarely missed an opportunity to argue that he would be a better friend to Israel than President Obama. He has pounded the president on the issue of Iran, saying he has failed to champion sanctions crippling enough to prevent Tehran from getting a nuclear weapon. He has accused Obama of speaking at the United Nations as if "our closest ally in the Middle East was the problem. " And he has spoken in glowing and deferential terms of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu - "Bibi," as he referred to him - whose frictions with Obama have at times burst into the open.

Amanda Ross-Ho makes art that engages in nonstop translation - ephemeral drawings morph into solid rooms, miniature sizes balloon into maximum magnitudes, magazine advertisements turn into gold-finished jewelry, childhood scribbles change into grown-up philosophical musings. She's the Babel fish of contemporary art. "Amanda Ross-Ho: Teeny Tiny Woman," her wry and seriously playful show at the Museum of Contemporary Art branch at the Pacific Design Center, is large in ambition and generous in rewards.

The hosts of "Car Talk," brothers Ray and Tom Magliozzi, had a long, wildly successful run for 25 years on NPR. They're currently planning to hang up their mics later this year and get out of the radio business on a high note. But the talents that made them beloved (their attitudes and their voices) didn't necessarily make them multimedia stars. The brothers tried multiple times to branch out into TV, but with limited success. Their first attempt came in the 1995 sitcom "The George Wendt Show.

For a handful of people, Clarice Lispector's "A Breath of Life" being published in English for the first time is very good news. Sadly, that handful is fairly small. Lispector, an extraordinarily gifted writer who revolutionized Brazilian letters, was described as "that rare person who looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf. " Ukrainian-born and Brazilian-bred Lispector died in 1977, one day shy of her 57th birthday. Thanks in no small part to the efforts of Ben Moser, translator and author of the 2009 biography "Why This World," Lispector has lately had something of a rebirth in America.

A Chinese customer visited the Fox Hills branch of Wells Fargo Bank in Culver City recently to ask about several transactions on his checking account that didn't make sense to him. But he spoke only Mandarin, and no one in the bank could interpret. In Southern California, where more than 200 languages are spoken, it's the type of problem that businesses and their customers face every day. As a result, companies that offer interpreters over the phone are in great demand by retailers, hospitals, banks, restaurants and other merchants.

In a UCLA classroom one day not long ago, Alain Mabanckou was teaching a course in post-colonial African fiction, which he instructs in his French mother tongue, one of several languages he speaks. With his easygoing yet focused manner, soccer player's graceful body language and a way funkier fashion sense than the average college don, the 46-year-old Mabanckou kept his students' attention, framing moral quandaries for them to consider and regaling them with technical explanations of an African army's " technique de la terre brulee" (scorched earth policy)