If the phrase ‘EuroRail Pass’ is part of your vocabulary, then Herocraft’s Phrasebook 18-in-1 should be on your Nokia Symbian (S60 5th Edition) device. On any given language, it is an adequate phrasebook, but as you move around to many different countries, its all-in-one language nature stands out over one-off language phrasebooks. The languages include: English, German, French, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Russian, Hungarian, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Polish, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, and Greek. In other words, if you can get there via EuroRail, you can communicate with the locals. You can select any of the 18 languages as either the target or the source.

There are two versions of Phrasebook 18-in-1, a free Lite version and a full version. The Lite version only allows access to translations in the Basic module, although it will let users see what they are missing in the other modules by displaying source-language only portions. The Basics module is useful in that it gives approximately five of the most commonly-used phrases in each of nine categories to get the user started. Both Lite and full versions also have exercises with which the consumer can test knowledge of the recently-learned phrases.

For me, though, finer-grained communication is very important, so the $2.99 USD (plus VAT) cost of the full product seemed like a much better use of my personal resources. That investment opened up 2,100 phrases in the languages of my choice, and gave me the ability to string together the phrase parts to form more eloquent ideas. The additional categories included phrases that are commonly tied to traveling, hotels, local transport like buses and subways, sightseeing, banking, restaurant and food-and-drink related phrases, shopping, laundry, repairs, sports, health/drugstore phrases, beauty-care phrases, and some very good emergency phrases such as calling for police and describing an offense.

For the price, I thought that Phrasebook 18-in-1 represented good value. As a Nokia N97 user, I wish that it had a right-hand scroll bar, as the lists of categories are longer than one screen. Trying to use my fingers to scroll usually resulted in opening up whatever category that I was touching. I found using the rocker switch on the N97’s keyboard for up and down scrolling to be the accurate way to use the application, however.

On my wish list for a future version of this product, I would like to see it combined with a multi-language dictionary for ad hoc language improvisation. I would like to hear the translated phrases in addition to reading them, so there would need to be a synthetic voice portion added. And finally, although I believe that it meets the needs of the basic business taveler, in other phrasebooks I see a dating phrases module that would be useful for many in the young adult demographics.

A non-verbal video demo of Phrasebook 18-in-1 can is available here:

Phrasebook 18-in-1 Lite is free in Ovi Store; the full version is priced at $2.99 USD in Ovi Store.