WorldDictionary Review: Instant Translation via the iPhone Camera [Video]

When visiting a different country it can be frustrating and at times intimidating if you aren’t familiar with the language. But as Apple claims, there’s an app for that.

WorldDictionary is your perfect travel companion. Quite simply, you point your iPhone’s camera at any word, and the app automatically translates it for you into a number of different languages.

Currently WorldDictionary recognize and translates 21 languages. Some of those include English, French, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, German and many more.

You can even take a pictures of signs, book pages or anything else with words on it, and then later on translate the words by using the photo from your photo album.

The translations come from either Google or Bing but you can also search the word in Wikipedia or YouTube for more information of the meaning of the word or its history.

Here’s my quick little video showing WorldDictionary in action using my son’s French-English picture book.

As you can see, this app is very accurate, although it can be a little slow at times while it tries to four on the word you’re looking for. But overall it’s very good.

Of course you’ll need to make sure you have data connectivity to use it – which makes the translating from a picture function that much more useful.

At $7.99 in the app store, WorldDictionary isn’t cheap. But it beats carrying around a translation dictionary or trying to type out a foreign word like something in Chinese.

If you’re someone who loves to travel, or maybe a someone learning a different language, this app is very useful.

What do you think?