October 29, 2011

If you are traveling or you have contact with someone who speaks another language, you might sometimes need a translation – but you don’t have time to type it out. With help of  Worlddictionary for iPhone by Penpower you can quickly get things translated just by pointing your iPhone camera towards the text you want translated.

Real-time translation works for individual words by hovering over the needed word and get translation immediately.

Unfortunately when it comes to big text with little contrast I couldn’t get it recognized no matter how sharp I had it.

This is not that bad considering that Microsoft’s Bing app for Windows Phone is not recognizing this big grey word too (see below to find more about OCR in Windows Phone!).

There is button where you can get additional info about given word, where it is visible that this app actually uses Google translation webservice over Internet to get translations and usually returns just one word (what may be desired to avoid clutter) but one can get more info via button and searches.

Text recognition (OCR) is working while offline but not the translation not.

Interestingly, sentence translation (not just individual words) is working very well too, but it is more manual naturally.

Once getting text recognized you can correct it (see above) and then it will get translated as whole sentence.

Note: in built-in Bing app in Windows Phone there is text scanning too (and also barcode scanner, but that’s another fairytale):

But this Worldictionary app offers more options and gives similar results and is similarly reliable.

Conclusion

While this app is a bit pricey, if you are traveling and you have data roaming where you travel, this app may come in handy for you. Also if you read texts in foreign languages without traveling it may also be useful. This app doesn’t have offline dictionaries so it is more of a OCR (optical character recognition) combined with web service caller, than a real dictionary (= original content) but it’s working, even if translations are a bit shallow (sometimes words have many meanings) and it does what it promises: translation of everything what you see without typing.

To get this app tap here:
Worlddictionary for iPhone by Penpower (price: $7.99).

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