Earlier this week, a friend of mine let me know about an application on iTunes called Google Translate.

Many of you will know I live in Belgium and am currently learning Dutch, as it is one of two main languages in Belgium (the other being French, though German is the official third language). On my iPhone, I had downloaded an app that translates Dutch to English, and vice versa. I think I probably paid $1.99 for it.

But this Google Translate app has to be the best translation app by far, mainly for 4 reasons:

1. It’s free.
2. You can translate text for 57 languages.
3. For 15 of the languages, you can translate by speaking the text instead of typing it.
4. For 23 of the languages, you can listen to your translation spoken aloud.

So, for me, this was great because English and Dutch (and French for later on) were included in the speaking and listening components of the translator. It’s not that I am going to be pulling this out to translate Dutch into English (or the other way around) every moment of the day. But I was simply fascinated that the voice recognition software clearly picked up my voice. I was doing test words, phrases and sentences that I already knew in Dutch, and they were spot on in translation! The only time it didn’t get it perfect was when I switched to a very southern, country American accent.

Anyways, if you have an iPhone, iPod touch or iPad, do a search on iTunes for Google Translate and download the app. And you can read about it more here.