Google Translate now available for iPhone

The frequent travelers will know this very well. You’ve landed in a country where the natives don’t speak your language and you don’t speak theirs. So what is a traveler to do? In the good old days, we’ve resorted to sign language, sometimes a mini game of charades and even win, lose or draw in the streets. Well with this new app from Google, you will never again be the laughing stock of the locals.

Google Translate is a very useful app that provides simple and quick translation for more languages than you’ll ever need.

There’s a nifty speak to translate feature where you just say the word you want to translate and the app will do the rest. After you’ve translated the word, you can have the app say the word or sentence for you as well. Currently Google Translator understands 15 languages and speaks 23.

Google Translate also includes the ability to view dictionary results for single words, star or mark regularly used translations for quick reference as well as go through your translation history. The app also supports romanized text like Pinyin and Romaji.

On top of that there’s a full-screen mode where you can have the translated word or sentence displayed in big, bold and clear text for quick and easy reading. As you can see sometimes the translation is not what you want to say but if you keep your communications simple, Google Translate can help in so many ways.

Google Translate is free and here’s the iTunes link. The app works on any iPhone or iPod touch that runs iOS 3 and above.

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