With the iPhone’s high resolution camera, you can even take a photo of a street sign while driving down the highway in Germany and have the software instantly translate the text on the sign to English, so you know where you are going (of course, you shouldn’t use the phone while driving – have your traveling companion do that for you.) The solution is available for the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4 .

Speech technology provider Loquendo (News - Alert) teamed up with INLOQ VOICE Solutions, a Loquendo German agency, and beyo, supplier of camera-based information technologies, to launch this new multilingual translating app, which is called SnapTranslate.

According to Loquendo, SnapTranslate provides translation rapidly thanks to PONS translation software. The translation is then “read out for you in Loquendo’s fluent, expressive TTS – available in a market-leading voice/language portfolio.”

Available languages include English, French, Spanish, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Turkish, Russian and Polish.

"We are happy to cooperate with Loquendo and PONS because it gives us an opportunity to implement our technical know-how in the field of text recognition and translation in cooperation with well-renowned companies," said Cüneyt Göktekin, managing director at beyo, in a release.Gabriele Schmidt, managing director at PONS, said with SnapTranslate “we are continuing our development of innovative and sophisticated dictionary and translation apps of first-rate quality for iPhone users.”

“We are quite sure that, along with the high quality of PONS’ dictionaries, it will be the application’s speed and intuitive user friendliness that will satisfy our users above all," he added.

Claudio Genova, sales manager, Loquendo embedded technologies, said the new app “combines several pioneering technologies in one single application, including Loquendo’s multilingual synthetic speech. Ideal when on the move or in a hurry, users simply take a photo to have an accurate translation in seconds.”