Need a translating application for your smartphone or tablet? Then you should try Worldictionary developed by Penpower Incorporated. But you may say, why not use the Google Translate? While the Google Translate app is good, this app will allow you to hold up your smartphone or tablet camera up in front of the document for instant word translation.

As mentioned, this app does live word translation, which is good especially if you need it instantly. I can see this app practical if you are a student or new to a language. This app will provide an instant speech feature, which means if you select a word from your “translated word” list; it will pronounce the word for you.

This app is available on iOS and Android, and the application is from the same company that developed WorldCard Mobile. This app was tested on an iPad 3^rd generation, but is available for iPhone 4/3Gs, iPod Touch 4^th Generation on iOS. The application also works on the iPad 2 and newer versions. It works in the languages English, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish. It can translate to/from into these languages: Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, English, Japanese, Korean, French, Germany, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Finnish, Danish, and Norwegian.  The app costs $7.99 on the iOS App Store, and $6.26 on Google Play.

This app features:

• Instant translation
• Sentence translation
• Bing or Google Translation services
• A built-in dictionary
• Speech-to-text
• Saves your translation search records
• Provides Google/Wikipedia/YouTube Search
• Manual word input if you wish

One of my favourite features is the sentence translation service, and it is quite simple to use. All you have to do is hold up your camera on your device, and then take a picture. Once it is taken, it will ask you to verify the picture. Once accepted, you will crop out the sentence or sentences you wish to translate, and it will translate your picture to words. Although this is cool, it is not always 100% accurate. A good example is mixing up the lowercase letter “l” with the letter “t.” Sometimes, it doesn’t even recognize the sentence at all and gives me random words and letters. So you have to make sure your text is correct at first before translating. Also, the translations sometimes don’t make sense all the time, but that can be the fault of the translating service, not the application itself. Finally, I would love to see an iPad native version of the app.

Overall, this application is good, but not perfect. There are some tweaks that should be made, including more accurate picture-to-text letter recognition. Penpower Incorporated should bring an iPad native app. If you have the money, it’s a good app to invest in, and is a good expansion of the Google Translate application. Also, invest in the application if you are learning a new language, or if you are in school learning a new language. If you liked this post and want to see more in the feature, be sure to visit us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ for the latest updates!