It has been a longstanding dream for computer scientists, computational linguists, and tech-minded travelers in a rush: the hand-held language translator, which would more or less instantly translate back and forth between its owner’s native tongue and that of the people he or she encounters in a foreign land. Simple such devices already are on the market in the form of electronic phrase books, some of which can audibly pronounce strings of words as well as display text translations on a small screen. The ultimate such gizmo, currently being researched with much secrecy by the U.S. military, would translate live speech in real-time.

As essentially a set of dual-language pocket dictionaries, the ABBYY FotoTranslate family of apps. priced at $9.99 (USD) apiece, is situated at the lower end of this spectrum of functionality. Using these apps on a Nokia Symbian OS, S60 3.X or 5.0 device, one can look up words and phrases in, say, English, and see their equivalents in Spanish or Russian or German, for instance.

What makes ABBYY FotoTranslate substantially more clever than the average electronic dictionary, however, is that it does not require any typing to look up words. That’s because the software is able to visually decode written words as captured with the Nokia phone’s built-in camera. Thus, you can simply point your phone’s camera at a sign or at the page of a newspaper, click the shutter to capture an image, and watch as the software analyzes that image – this takes a few seconds, only – and tells you how the words it finds there translate into a target language.

It truly is that simple and it truly does work. And the app, using the kind of optical character recognition (OCR) technology originally developed for scanning printed pages into computers, is entirely self-contained; no “live” network connection is required. That means the app consumes a good chunk of phone memory, but it also means it will work in the middle of the proverbial jungle.

As shown in the images we’ve included here, the software can recognize and interpret text printed in a fairly wide range of sizes and fonts. What’s important, evidently, is that the text be large enough for the software to “see.“ It goes without saying that the images must be well lit, in focus, and without blur from moving the camera, but it’s also necessary for the text to be fairly straight and parallel with the top and bottom edges of the image frame. To help with this, the app provides a line stretching across the middle of the viewing screen to help you align the words you’re trying to capture. Yet, as the following screenshot shows, the software is not defeated by slightly imperfect images caused by the curve in a book’s page.

What if an image captures multiple words? No problem. The software is “smart” enough to identify individual words, which you can select for translation by touching them one by one on the phone’s screen. As soon as you’ve selected a word, the app shows the corresponding dictionary entry. As far as we can tell, however, the app is not able to recognize and translate phrases, only single words.

There is something nifty about seeing this process in action. We found ourselves trying out the software on different kinds of text and seeing how accurately it worked. All in all, its “hit rate” was quite impressive, far higher than one might think would be possible given the limited computing power in a mobile device.

How practical is ABBYY FotoTranslate to use while out and about in the world? Alas, we’ve not had the opportunity – are you listening, boss? – to go somewhere exotic and engage in the rigorous, scientific field research needed to answer this question. But we can, even sitting in front of our computer keyboard, imagine situations where this software might come in handy: when there’s a menu item that needs decoding, for instance, or a traffic sign, historical plaque, or museum display that just won’t yield to common sense. (Whether or not one would feel comfortable whipping out a phone and snapping flash photos in a quiet café is another question.)

Of course, one can solve most translation problems the good old-fashioned way, by simply looking up words in an appropriate phrase book or dictionary. For travellers that means one more item to lug around, but books have the unique advantage of making loads of information available for easy, and even serendipitous browsing: Who knows what new word or bit of local lore one might learn while paging through a phrase book?

Nevertheless, ABBYY Fototranslate is a nifty, ultra-modern solution to an age-old problem. It supports a variety of popular European languages – English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Russian, Spanish and Ukrainian – though you must purchase multiple versions of the app to encompass all of these. For a full of description of the program’s features, check out ABBYY’s website – you can also find a full listed of supported Nokia devices.

The ABBYY FotoTranslate English-Spanish application is available for $9.99 (USD) in Ovi Store.

Editor’s Note: Good one, John. Well done. Your request for a travel  budget has been noted, and  is currently under review. It will likely remain that way for some time.  Meanwhile, we invite our readers to share their travel plans with us, and more importantly, let us know in the Comments section below what apps you use on the road.