Travel has gotten ridiculously easy, but communicating with people in their local language remains hard. Even acquiring a few phrases in a foreign language can be challenging. For example, before I visited China some years ago, I worked very hard to memorize a few common Chinese phrases. Unfortunately, once I arrived in China, no one could understand a word I said!

I wish I had had BabelPhone English-Chinese. It’s a mobile app that does the talking for you. You simply select from the app’s list of more than 200 common English phrases. Then BabelPhone, using your mobile device’s built-in speakers, says the phrase aloud in Mandarin, the dialect spoken by more than half China’s population. BabelPhone also displays your word or phrase in both English and Chinese on the device’s screen, along with an English transliteration. So if the Chinese person speaks a dialect other than Mandarin, they can simply read from a BabelPhone screen.

Fire up BabelPhone, and you start with a choice of Phrases, Favourites, About, or Quit. Tap Phrases, and you’re taken to this main Categories menu:

There are 20 categories in all. There is also a Words category that displays single words in both English and Chinese, but does not speak them aloud; these are arranged in categories, too, such as Colours, Body Parts, and Fruit.

From this menu, you select the category you want to view the list of possible phrases. For example, here’s the list of phrases you’ll see in the Taxi category:

When you click on a specific phrase, it appears on the screen in three versions: English, Chinese characters, and transliteration (including markings for Mandarin’s four tones). At the same time, the phrase is heard spoken from the device’s speakers. Here’s what you see when you select, ‘Can you take me to the airport?’

The Options command, offered when you select a phrase, gives you a few, um, options. You can have the phrase spoken again – useful, given the likely shock value of a talking mobile device! You can adjust the volume. And you can save the phrase to your Favourites list:

Favourites are simply phrases you expect to use frequently: ‘please’, ‘thank you’, and that soft of thing. You can also edit your Favourites list, adding items, of course, but also deleting a single phrase or all phrases. Here you can see that I’ve added two phrases to my Favourites list: Hello, and Thank you. In the lower left-hand corner, you can see my options for this list:

While BabelPhone is amazing, its 200 or so phrases can’t possibly satisfy your every need. Nonetheless, its developers have gone way beyond the sort of dull things you’re likely to find in, say, a Berlitz phrasebook. ‘I am not going to pay!’, listed under the Getting Angry category, could come in handy. And if it’s romance you’re looking for, select the Fun & Flirting category, which starts with, ‘You are the most beautiful woman/man I ever met’, moves on to, ‘I am in love’, and proceeds unabashedly to, ‘Did you bring condoms?’

No one’s perfect, and on the Nokia N97 I used to test BabelPhone, some aspects of the UI were tricky. For example, dragging a list with my finger or the stylus often caused the accidental opening of a category I didn’t want. Also, I sometimes had to tap a command more than once for it to ‘take’. The app seems to run only in profile mode; I could not get it to operate in landscape. The Dutch developers neglected to translate the words in the Family category into English; so instead of ‘father, mother, son’, I saw ‘Vader, Moeder, Zoon’. I would love to see the addition of a search function. And under the Food and Drinking category, a helpful addition would be the names of common restaurant dishes.

BabelPhone English-Chinese was developed by XS2TheWorld, an Amsterdam-based company that describes itself as mobile marketing and branding specialists. The app is free in Ovi Store, and it needs 1.17 megabytes of storage. Because this app is self-contained, you won’t need to worry about finding an open Internet connection to use it.

To see videos of BabelPhone in action, visit XS2TheWorld’s video page. And  have fun – that is, xīwàng nín wán de kāixīn!