I recently wrote a post offering gift ideas for international travelers. In that post, I mentioned that an application could be purchased for the iphone to translate words on menus and signs, a perfect gift for study abroad students and travelers.

Today, I discovered “Word Lens.”  This application instantaneously translates from Spanish to English/English to Spanish WITHOUT being connected to the internet. There is a $4.95 fee to download the entire program.  There are future plans to roll out the app with French, followed by Italian and then Portuguese.  (The iphone pic translator mentioned in the post above translates more than just Spanish/English.)

Here is a short video that illustrates the application:

Of course, the best way to know what these signs actually say is to LEARN the language, and obviously, I’m much more of an advocate of that!  However, for those who are new to languages and especially for safety reasons (the example given in the video was the shark bite!), this could be a very handy tool.