If you frequently travel, the application we’re about to tell you about may pique your interest. Word Lens is an application developed by Quest Visual that uses your iPhone’s camera to translate text from one language to another on the fly. Try to envision what would happen if Yelp’s “Monocle” feature were to be mashed together with Google Translate. Launch the application, aim your iPhone’s camera as some text, and the translation is done on the fly without a network con...

If you’re proficient in Russian, Polish, Czech, or Turkish, and want to search the web in one of the aforementioned tongues, Google has got you covered. Recently, the company announced the addition of the four languages to its Voice Search functionality. “Try speaking queries like ‘концерты Юлии Савичевой’ (tour dates for Yulia Svicheva), ‘przepis na pierogi’ (recipes for pierogi), ‘obrázky Hradčan’ (pictures of the Prague castle), or &...

UK-based Times Online is reporting that Google is developing a mobile phone service that will have the ability to translate speech, from one language to another, on the fly. Google’s hoping to build off of their text-to-text translation engine — which is currently capable of translating 52 languages — and voice search technologies. “We think speech-to-speech translation should be possible and work reasonably well in a few years’ time,” said Google’s chief of translation services....