WebProNews

An iPhone application known as "I Am Rich" has gotten some attention for being quite expensive and absolutely useless.  Now, at the opposite end of those scales, a certain search giant has launched Google Translate for iPhone.

Suppose you're wandering through a foreign city and decide to ask someone for help.  In a 300-page language dictionary, first find and guess at how to pronounce the word for "where."  Then go for "nearest," and next, "train" and "station."  By the time you finish this process and receive some understandable directions, the odds are good that your ride will be gone.

So here's the new alternative.  "Google Translate for iPhone is optimized for speed, supports all of the existing Google Translate language pairs, and uses a client-side data-store on your iPhone to hang on to your past translations so you always have them at hand, even if you can't use the local data network," according to software engineer Allen Hutchison.

Just show the translations to people to prevent yourself from somehow saying "Tibet" instead of "taxi," and don't spend much money in the process.  Google Translate for iPhone costs nothing by itself, and Hutchison writes, "For my plan, I found that I could translate 400 phrases for less than $10 when roaming internationally."

The one possible area where this service comes up short: unlike I Am Rich, Google Translate for iPhone will not display cool red things on your screen.