The Worldictionary App for iPhone – A Review

The Worldictionary is an app for translating words using an iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad. It is compatible with the iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 and 4S, iPod Touch (4th generation) and the iPad 2. All devices require the iOS 4.2 or later to run Worldictionary.

How do you translate using the Worldictionary app?

The Worldictionary app is a real-time translation tool that uses the iPhone, iPod Touch & iPad camera to recognize text and it will automatically translate to your selected language. The app uses the Bing or Google translation engine. You can choose which translation engine to you. You select the translation engine in Settings:

Here is an example showing the real-time translation using Worldictionary:

In the example, I selected English to Spanish translation. I pointed the iPhone camera at an article in a magazine and you can see that the camera recognized the word “Unlock” and automatically translated the word to Spanish using the Google translation engine. You will also notice a speaker icon in the screenshot below. You can listen to the word(s) using the speaker icon. You can also save the image on your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad if you decide to.

Here is another example of a real-time translation from English to Indonesian. The camera picked up and recognized the word “Approaching” and translated it to Indonesian.

You can bookmark recognized words or use the search function to lookup the word on Google, Wikipedia or YouTube. You can also send the translation to an email address or SMS.

The Worldictionary app comes with an online and offline dictionary and allows you to translate to most languages including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Latin, etc. The online dictionary includes most languages but you will need either wi-fi or 3G connection to use the online dictionary for translations.

As for the offline dictionary it is currently limited to only English to Chinese (Traditional and Simplified).

What I think of the Worldictionary App

1. It supports most widely used languages, i.e. English, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, etc.
2. The text recognition using OCR is very accurate.
3. The word by word translation can take time if you want to translate sentences.
4. It’s handy when you need to do ad hoc translation since it’s installed on a mobile device.

The Worldictionary app is priced at $7.99 and you can purchase the app from iTunes.

Read more at Technology Blog by Ash Chuan