Google engineers, Allen Hutchinson and David Singleton have customized the web app Google Translate for the iPhone. It supports bi-directional translations between all the existing language pairs in Google Translate. (23 languages, both European and Asian, with bi-directional translatibility among any of them) It is fast and like all Google products, very neat. You can directly go to Google Translate from your iPhone safari browser.

What is special:

Client-side data store on the iPhone, which allows the user to use the past translations even if they are not able to access the local data network.

The program is written with AJAX Language API. Hence, every time a language update is made at Google Translate, it is automatically from your iPhone.

Google does not charge anything for this. However, the iPhone carriers do, if you are on international roaming.

Google maps, gmail, Google Earth and now Google Translate.  Seems like the Google–iPhone collaboration is growing in a multi-directional fashion:

“iPhone is a powerful new device and is going to be particularly good for the apps that Google is building. You should expect other announcements from the two companies over time” – Eric Schimdt, Google CEO and Apple’s board member.

Brave new world?