Japan Goggles takes the pain out of understanding Japanese [Video]

Finland has sent a strong delegation of mobile startups to Mobile World Congress this week. Among them is LucSens, a company working in the rapidly developing mobile translation space.

I met founder Iulian Florea, who demoed the company’s Japan Goggles app for iPhone for me. Similar to Google Goggles and Word Lens, the app allows you to translate text captured by your phone’s camera into English. However, not only does this handle Japanese (unlike Google’s app), this works entirely without any need for an Internet connection.

LucSens, which also offers a version of the app for Chinese, is concentrating solely on east Asian languages and plans to expand onto Android in the near future.