Ever been in a foreign country and needed help reading the street signs, a menu, or other simple text? Babelshot (photo translator) is an app for iPhone that is designed to allow users to upload a picture of text in one language and translate it to your native tongue. Seems like an ideal helper if you’re on a multi-country cruise or visiting a foreign place for the first time and don’t know the language

Ever been in a foreign country and needed help reading the street signs, a menu, or other simple text? Babelshot (photo translator) is an app for iPhone that is designed to allow users to upload a picture of text in one language and translate it to your native tongue. Seems like an ideal helper if you’re on a multi-country cruise or visiting a foreign place for the first time and don’t know the language. Plus, you could ditch the conversion dictionary in certain instances and appear less “touristy.”

Hearing the description, Babelshot appears, for all intents and purposes, to be the ideal iPhone app for translating languages. However, it has its flaws if you’re not using the right equipment.

Let me explain.

The way the captured image text translation works is by using the iPhone’s camera to take a photo from within the Babelshot app. Note, you cannot use a previously captured image from your photo library or camera roll. Once the image is captured, a text box appears to crop the text to be recognized and translated. If it doesn’t recognize the text correctly, it asks you to manually edit the text to create the correct entry.

Babelshot’s photo translator works great if you have an iPhone 3GS, but use anything else and the images won’t be sharp enough for the optical character recognition system to work. If you want to use Babelshot with an iPhone 3G or earlier, you’ll need a way to improve the camera’s macro capabilities.

Even if you’re not blessed with an iPhone 3GS, you can still use Babelshot’s manual translation while you wait for your Clarifi case from Griffin Technology.

The other thing to remember is that the iPhone’s picture quality is limited in less than perfect lighting, so the efficiency of Babelshot may be compromised in low-light situations, such as in a restaurant, or if you need to translate a bus schedule at night.

Don’t let these warnings scare you. Babelshot is user-friendly, mostly accurate, and accepts quite a bit of text for translation. As long as you own the right phone or accessories, you’ll be pleased with the features of Babelshot. And, if you do have to type in your text for translation? Well, even if you only use it as a traditional text translator, Babelshot is still a bargain at $2.99.

There are dozens and dozens of languages supported: Danish, French, English, German, Hungarian, Swahilli, Turkish, Hebrew, Chinese, Greek, and Portuguese are but a sampling of the languages Babelshot supports.

• rating: 7/10
• app_name: Babelshot

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Babelshot Takes Aim at Text Translation with Photos |
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Babelshot Takes Aim at Text Translation with Photos