There have been many times in my life when I wished I could translate something that is around me. Different languages are everywhere and there has never been such a need for translation on a day to day bases. Fortunately, everyone with an iPhone is set up perfectly to translate on the go. Babelshot offers direct translation of over 35 different languages to your native language. But the large selling point for this app is that it can take a photo of the text you are trying to translate (as long as the language is one of the 32 supported) and automatically convert it to text and translate.

The process is actually pretty simple. Take a photo, crop it, verify the text, and then hit translate. It worked extremely well everytime I did it but there are two large pitfalls with this app. Some very popular languages are not available for use with the camera including Japanese, Chinese, Hebrew, Greek, and Russian. The other downfall has to do with the iPhone hardware itself as anyone with a 3G will struggle to get large paragraphs in focus and therefore can't use the photo feature.

Overall, the app did what it promised but for the price that is being asked, I can't justify grabbing it. There are so many translation apps out there that can do similar, if not better, things. So I suggest only grabbing this if you are really interested in it's specific feature.