You’ve probably heard about Word Lens by now. It’s a cool little iPhone app that lets you use the iPhone camera to translate the words on objects into another language, the resulting translation appearing in place of the original text on an image of the object itself. Very cool.
Sign in a restaurant in Dublin’s Temple Bar.
The Word Lens replacement translation.
Much of the industry debate has been been about the quality of the translation (as good or bad as you might expect) or positioning the app within a category of other mobile translation apps while speculating what would happen if you plugged the thing into Google Translate or something similar.
My own tests of the app’s translation accuracy were disappointing (see the images above). But, for me, the real innovation here is the augmented reality aspect to the device. For the first time (that I know of, anyway), we have a freely available app (though those dictionaries you pay for) that allows practical augmented reality and translation to come together in a very cool user experience paradigm.
It’s the user experience that’s important here to focus on here, not the linguistic quality. It also serves to remind me that we need to expect innovation in the translation space to come from outside what we consider to be the GILT industry and not from within.
Watch out for more user experience issues (personalization, augmented reality, natural user interfaces, and so on) coming to the fore in the localization space in 2011.
wow, i’m impressed. i don’t have an iphone though, still very impressed
Hey. Looks like you found the #1 most embarrassing bug in the software. I’m one of the developers. There’s currently a bug related to certain accents getting looked up wrong in the dictionary.
I’m going to fix that for the next release and then Español should translate correctly. Until that release, I’ll just have to painfully watch as the internet uncovers our version 1.0 bugs. 
To address the translation quality issue in general, our goal here hasn’t been to make a perfect translation. It has been to make a useful translation for tourists. Because of that, we’ve decided to do a basic word-for-word translation with no grammar adjustments. There’s still a lot of room for quality improvements though, and we’ll be working hard on that.
-Otavio
Thanks for the update Otavio. I have the app and send you other feedback. Is there an official channel for this such feedback? I am sure others would be glad to help as well.
Ultan
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In fact, there is a response to my question on Quora, asking about how to submit feedback. See http://www.quora.com/Word-Lens/How-do-I-submit-feedback-on-Word-Lens-app-translation-quality#ans254956
Why don’t you use the Google Translate API to translate? I know this is possible with websites, not sure about mobile apps.
The best free app for I phone I would say is called “World Nomads”. At the amzing price of 0 Euros, Pounds or whatever your local currency is, World Nomads offers translation into and from 23 languages, including Lao, Nepali, Malay, Greek or Turkish translation . The app presents lists, with some dozen basic travel phrases. Different categories, such as places to stay or directions & transport, make orientation easy. You can even get an audio file of a native speaker pronouncing it. Here we go to discover the world!