Hello, Bonjour, Hola, and welcome to our Babylon Translator review for Nokia Lumia 800. As you may have guessed from our European languages-for-dummies intro (not to mention the name of the app) this is a review of a translation app. Will it help you through your next holiday, or will you have to resort to speaking loudly in English? Find out in our Babylon Translator for Nokia Lumia 800 review.

Nokia Lumia 800 app: RAC Traffic Windows Phone review

One thing we're shamefully inept at when compared to our European neighbours is speaking languages other than our own.

You only have to walk down a German straße or a Dutch straat and ask a random passer-by in English how they think the weather will turn out and you'll probably get a startlingly articulate reply in their second tongue. Meanwhile most of us can't even ask for a drink in another language without collapsing into nervous giggles.

Apps like Babylon Translator might be a bit of a plaster over our gaping ignorance, but they sure are useful. Acting as a powerful multi-lingual pocket-assistant, it should certainly be considered by any Nokia Lumia 800 owners about to set off on their holidays with a poor grasp on the local dialect.

It's pretty easy to use, too. Open Babylon Translator up and you'll be greeted by a Term search field, along with a larger results field and four language tabs. This means you can type in an English word and get a translation in four languages simultaneously - handy for those awkward hostelling moments.

There are issues here, however. While it's simple enough to get a direct translation for languages using the same alphabet, try translating a word into a language that uses another character set, such as Japanese or Chinese, and you'll get a completely useless direct translation. There's no romanisation feature here, so rather than getting a 'Konnichiwa' - the Japanese for hello spelt out in phonetic English - you get the original Japanese characters for the word.

There's also a niggle that can't even be explained away under the banner of the more difficult languages. While you get the precise translation for words as long as they're in the Latin alphabet, you don't always get extra help. Babylon Translator will also pull in extra information on each word from a variety of sources, including language guides and Wikipedia. The only trouble is, many of these are written in the native language, which means they're very little help for English speakers.

More useful is the full text translation tool, which lets you type in whole passages of text and have it translated into any one of the more than 75 languages on offer here. Well, we say that, but again the app has trouble with non-romanised languages. While we're picking fault, Babylon Translator could also use a pronunciation function that doesn't just show you how the translations are written, but actually speaks the words to help with your pronunciation.

There is a handy currency and measurement translator here, but the important part is undoubtedly the language translation element, and on that front Babylon Translator isn't quite firing on all cylinders just yet. Still, it is handy as a rudimentary translation tool covering a number of European languages - especially considering it's free on the Windows Phone Marketplace.

Our advice is to download Babylon Translator and keep an eye on those update notification - a few decent updates could raise it to greatness.