The january 2015 update of the Google Translate app for iOS and Android devices offers powerful and impressive machine translation capabilities.
First, Google Translate offers instant translation using your camera to recognize and to automatically overlay the translated text on the screen. (this is the technology from Word Lens which Google acquired some time ago). Instant translation currently works for translation from English to and from French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish. Note that the Google Translate app can still scan a photo taken from your phone and to get a translation of it in 36 languages.
What's more interesting is the ability for your phone to capture audio from two speakers and have Google Translate speak a translated version so two speakers speaking different languages can communicate back and forth.
Watch Google Translate in action:
