There’s no shortage of apps that let you chat with your friends on mobile devices. There’s apps like GroupMe, WhatsApp, Kakao Talk, that appeal to people who want to talk to their friends outside of a normal text message.

The feature sets of these apps are pretty common, they include; group chat, emoticons, Facebook integration, custom themes, and even your own phone number. One thing they all missed the boat on was translation. It seems like an obvious feature, but it’s not something that we’ve seen until now.

TransFire is an instant messaging app that translates conversations in real-time using Google Translate‘s API. If you have friends all over the globe who might speak different languages than you, this iOS app is a no-brainer to download.

Translation station

Even though Google Translate will work on your Chrome browser, the real-time chat capabilities that TransFire opens up make the technology way more useful. Google’s own chat product, Google Talk, allows you to add translation bots to your contacts that will assist with chat translation, but I think a more native experience like the one TransFire offers is the way to go.

You can log into the app with your Facebook account and it will look for friends that have installed it. TransFire will also scan your address book for friends with the app.

While this app isn’t the prettiest chat app on the market, the utility it provides far surpasses what it lacks in eye-catching design. Since it uses Google Translate, TransFire will translate your chats into over 50 languages.

If you work with someone from another country, or if your friends prefer to speak in their native language online, this app is perfect to keep a fluid conversation going. The other nice part about the app is that it doubles as a standalone translation tool, and gives you the ability to share your translated text on Facebook, Twitter, SMS, or email.

If you can look past the lackluster design, which isn’t too horrific, this app can save you a lot of time when you’re just trying to carry out a normal conversation with someone who speaks a different language than you do. One thing the app is lacking is open chatrooms for people to communicate all over the globe. I think it would be an awesome way to meet people from different countries if you could understand what they’re saying 100% of the time. Perhaps this is something that TransFire will offer in the future.

➤ TransFire

Let’s talk translation. Remember Babel fish? Good at the time, but they lost their place in the market due to the quality of human powered Google translation with an API. Today, we have another player in the market, Facebook connect. Once you’ve integrated Facebook connect into your site, you can offer users a variety of languages to translate the website into, thanks to the Facebook Translations application. Something Babelfish, Google, WordPress but also Twitter can learn from, don’t be the API – integrate translation services on Blogger, Twitter, WordPress etc. seamlessly.

Ok leaving the Facebook promotion out of the way – hooray for their new service – but that is not my point. I am enthusiastic about this particular translation service because I believe it’s about time that along with the world itself, the Internet becomes flat as well. (Are you reading this Thomas Friendman?) The image above displays the Internet penetration of the world, according to worldstats, made for Wiki by Emilfaro (CC). These (mostly) California based companies need to get their heads out of the US and realize that the next step is to make language a transparent artifact on the Internet. Recognise that, at the time of writing, China has already 30% more internet users then the US. Group Japan, India and Brazil together, and you get another group at the US proportions, according to the Internet world stats.

Twitter

One of the best examples of removing the language barriers can be found on Twitter. There is plentiful amount of relevant information on Twitter, especially with Geolocation coming up. The problem is that Twitter can be translated using RSS feeds, but it still requires a lot of work. It would be nice if Twitter could integrate an option to translate feeds on the go, either based on Google or Facebook translation services, I don’t care.

Global dialogue

The existing painful and long process can be reduced, both with feedlanguage.com and Firefox plugins like FoxLingo, but they still require manual work to accomplish the optimum result. The experience of reading Zwahili, Arabic, Spanish or German should be unnoticeable in order to create a truly global dialogue. Tapping the crowd, the true Internet crowd is essential in order for us to understand the new world.