I remember the first time I visited Spain at the tender age of sixteen; struggling with both the language and my own identity, I romped around regional towns with abandon … until I discovered the Spanish toilet. Naturally I was horrified by the shower-recess-cum-lavatory (perhaps not the best choice of words), which in the middle of summer in the Basque region was a fly’s smorgasbord and a young effete’s version of hell … porcelainified. When I eventually came to grips and put my feet on the—you guessed it—grips it wasn’t until I had dropped trou that I made a discovery, or rather it was made glaringly clear to me. “Santo Dios!” a largish woman called along with a bunch of other unintelligible Spanish affectations—I was in the chicas and not the chicos.
Word Lens is a new iPhone app that uses the camera along with sophisticated technology to decipher printed signage, menus and anything that has the potential to get you into hot water in realtime. In the vein of Daphnée: Your Lovely French Teacher, it brings linguistic interactivity to the palm of your hand. Some of the translations may be a tad literal—french fries are simply ‘papas fritas‘ and not ‘francés patatas fritas‘ but it should be enough to get you by. The app is free to download and each translation is an additional is $9.99, currently only available in Spanish to English (and vice versa).
It comes hot on the heels of Google’s entry int the market, Google Translate, which is available on the iPhone and Android; the Android addition allowing parties to talk to one another for immediate translation. Although it’s still in is experimental stages, it should be accurate enough to deduce that “Esta chica me molesta” doesn’t seem quite as ominous as it looks in English!
Here’s a video demonstration of the Word Lens app in action:
Published on 24 February 2011 by Agony Uncle