First up is Jibbigo, available for iOS or Android. It’s a bilingual translation app that translates speech in almost real time between 9 language pairs. While it’s not the cheapest app out there, $4,99 on the App Store and Android Market, it works surprisingly well as long as you’re in a reasonably quiet environment. To translate, you fire up the app, select your language pair, hold down the record button for the language you’re going to speak and then wait to hear the translation. Once you’re finished speaking, Jibbigo takes a moment to think, then speaks the translation and displays accompanying translated text. You then repeat the process for the person you’re having a conversation with.

The great thing about Jibbigo is it works offline, no data connection needed. Each language has a database of around 40,000 words, and while it’s not correct 100% of the time, it’s a great app to help make sure you’re understood when you need it. You’ll need an iPhone 3GS or above or a current generation Android device with at least a 1ghz processor to run it.

Next up is Word Lens, another unique translation app that provides real time translation, but this time with printed text. Currently Word Lens is only available on iOS but an Android version is also slated to be released sometime in the future. The concept is surprisingly simple, just point your iPhone’s camera at a piece of text and it magically translates it, overlaying the translation on the screen. The effect is pretty remarkable as you’ll see in the video below. Like Jibbigo, Word Lens doesn’t need a data connection so you don’t need to worry about huge data roaming costs when you use it abroad.

Unfortunately the biggest let down is the limited language pairs, currently Spanish to English and English to Spanish. When tested against Google Translate, the accuracy wasn’t quite as good, however with Google Translate you have to speak or type in the phrase you want translated. Word Lens also seemed to get confused when the image it was capturing was busy with other information, so the cleaner and simpler the text you want to translate, the better.

With all this said, the ability of Word Lens to provide real time translated text from images is pretty impressive and we hope to see the technology improve in the future with better accuracy and more language pairs supported. If you’re off on your travels to Spain or South America and you don’t speak Spanish, this is definitely a useful app to add to your iPhone.

Finally we move to everyones favourite go-to translation service on the web, Google Translate, and their applications for both iOS and Android. Google translate has been around for a very long time now, and much of its early bugs have been ironed out. With 60 languages now supported the Google Translate mobile apps also feature speech recognition, the ability to star or ‘favourite’ translated phrases, and also SMS text message translation.

As part of a new update Google Translate now also supports conversation mode, similar to Jibbigo, where where 2 users can each take it in turn to speak and listen to translations. SMS translation is another nice addition, and overall as with nearly all Google Apps these days, it’s extremely intuitive and easy to use. Although not 100% reliable, slang can cause some interesting results, Google Translate for iOS and Android is free, and offers many of the features the other paid for apps include. The only downside? You’ll need a data connection wherever you use it, which means incurring data roaming costs.

And finally, although not available outside Japan, an honorable mention must go to NTT Docomo’s real-time translation service, launched back in may. The first-of-its-kind service allows mobile phone users to communicate in near real time across languages, hearing a translated version of what the other person is saying.

Recent demos have shown a marked improvement with the system which allows 2 callers to hold a voice conversation translated between English and Japanese. Each caller not only hears the other callers voice translated, they can also see the accompanying text in both languages as a conversation thread on screen, much like text messaging or chat.

NTT claims that speech recognition rates are up to 90% for Japanese and 80% for English which is a huge improvement on the original launch rates of 15-20%. The service is currently in test until March 2012 and if successful, NTT will begin rolling it out to its 56 million Japanese customers in the second half of the year.

Related articles

• Google Translate Goes Grande On The iPad (gizmodo.com.au)
• Google Translate for iOS Gets iPad Support (mashable.com)
• Lonely Planet Launches ‘Lonely Planet Offline Translator’ apps for iOS and Android (prweb.com)

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