If you've ever traveled abroad, then you know the terror that comes with ordering from a menu that you can't read. Will you accidentally order the deer penis, with a side of blanched tobacco leaves?

With a smartphone, you could use a translation dictionary to decipher each... and ... every ... word.... But it's such a pain that it's easy to skip it altogether, when pressured by a glowering waiter.

So here comes PicTranslator, a $.99 iPhone app that lets you take a picture, and then translate the foreign text in that picture (in all, there are 16 languages currently available):

After the fact, it's easy to wonder why this type of app hasn't existed before--but then again, perhaps the weakest links were processing power and cell-phone cameras. Better processers finally have the muscle to do image-to-text conversion--the sort you readily find in PDF readers--and better pics now provide the necessary resolution.

According to Eat Me Daily (ahem), there's still a couple of major bugs: You've got to have Internet access of some sort, and there's still a 10- to 60-second lag in the translation. But as iPhones/smartphones get larger memory stores, we're thinking this should become a totally offline app sometime soon.

In the meantime, avoid the testicules de moutons.

[Via Eat Me Daily]