What happens when you have to travel to lands where yours is not the native language? You may hire a translator for long business negotiations, but translation tools that run on a handheld device like a smartphone can be very helpful when there’s no human translator to rely on. Below we look at several translation tools that can help you find the right word while you’re abroad.

Web-based translation services

If you can connect to the Web, you can access some basic translation tools from virtually anywhere.  Bing Translator and Google Translate are both free translation tools that can be accessed from a browser. The sites operate in similar ways: You enter a word or phrase in one box and see a translation into the language of your choice in a second box. As of this writing, Google Translate supports about 50 languages; Bing Translator supports a few more than 20.

Before you leave, you’d be well advised to check out both sites on the device you’ll use. While both Bing and Google handily translated several phrases from English into Czech from the browser on my smartphone, the same browser would not display the phrases that either site translated from English into simplified Chinese. The Chinese characters were simply displayed as tiny boxes on the screen. That would not be a good thing to find out while making my way around China.

Smartphone-based translation tools

If you want a more robust translation tool and you’re willing to spend a few dollars, all the major smartphone platforms offer a variety of translation applications. These tools have several advantages over the Web-based tools described above. For one, they’ve been designed with the form factor and characteristics of your smartphone in mind — so they’ll operate elegantly on the screen of your smartphone, which is not always true if you’re using a mobile browser to interact with a Web-based application.

One thing to keep in mind: Some smartphone-based translation applications are true stand-alone applications, and don’t require Internet access. Other smartphone-based applications, however, are just thin client interfaces that send your word or phrase to an application on the Web for the actual translation. To use this kind of application, you’ll need Web access while you’re traveling. Again, check out the details before you go.