Official Babylon translator app released for Windows Phone

Babylon is a popular online translation service that is making its way over to the mobile world. Back in December, we mentioned that the company had taken advantage of Microsoft's Mobile Acceleration Week 2011 in Israel to build the popular language translator for Windows Phone. From the description at the time:

"As the leading name in text translation, it was only natural that Babylon would transition over to mobile devices. And so they did. Already available on iOS and Android, Babylon for Windows Phone allows you to translate any word, in any language, to the language of your choice, in real time. Of course, there is a lot more to the app including a currency converter, since presumably you will be using the app when traveling. The UI is super simplistic and hence very intuitive and does exactly what it is meant to do, how it is meant to do it."

That app is now live and while the service is very powerful it's not the best translator we've used, partially because it doesn't have direct sharing options (though you can copy paste) nor the ability to pronounce anything i.e. text-to-speech. That latter part irks us a bit as apps built off of Bing's Translator service can do this quite readily. Still, for direct translations of whole paragraphs, it's not too shabby and it is free meaning it is worth the download if you need such a service.

Pick up Babylon Translator here in the Marketplace. Check out Babylon's online translation here: http://translation.babylon.com/ Thanks, Hassan H., for the heads up

Daniel Rubino
Editor-in-chief

Daniel Rubino is the Editor-in-chief of Windows Central, head reviewer, podcast co-host, and analyst. He has been covering Microsoft since 2007 when this site was called WMExperts (and later Windows Phone Central). His interests include Windows, laptops, next-gen computing, and for some reason, watches. Before all this tech stuff, he worked on a Ph.D. in linguistics, watched people sleep (for medical purposes!), and ran the projectors at movie theaters because it was fun.

13 Comments
  • When I try to launch app, it crash.
  • I thought you guys fixed the QR codes from appearing in the WPCentral app?
  • Check back in 10 mins, should be fixed.
  • Yup. It does crash :/
  • Works ok on my Radar, but no Vietnamese, so not too useful for me.
  • well you cant expect vietnamese if their online translator doesnt even have that. it doesn't have as many languages as Bing Translator, which sucks sometimes.
  • WOW, went to linked web page and shortly after got one of those fake security scans. Please take this down or let me know why the site is serving up crap like that...
  • I have polyglot its a nice translator app also.
  • Wow, you would think they would have tried running the app with the "light" theme: you can barely see the text in certain parts of the app.
    DO NOT SUBMIT if your app does not work well on all theme settings. This should not need to be explained.
  • For some reason I was thinking Babylon 5 >_
  • Babylon 5 is awesome!
  • the babylon software is great, i want to know more about this software so that in future i can incorporate in my company..............for Translation services issues..
  • We have every intention of using Babylon software in our business translation services