Disregard academic integrity for two seconds. Imagine staring down at a hopeless body of Spanish text you know has to be translated by next period.

You turn on your smart phone and quickly open the application ‘Word Lens,’ which brings up the phone’s camera. Now holding your device above the difficult passage you look at the image on the screen and where there is Spanish on the actual paper there is English on your phone’s camera.

Magic? No, but Word Lens, the newest cutting edge application created by a company called Quest Visual, has revolutionized translation technology in seemingly magical ways.

The application was released by Quest Visual in December of 2010. Otávio Good, who created Word Lens, came up with the idea for his magnificent translation software as a simple means of convenience while traveling.

On vacation with his girlfriend in Germany, Good encountered difficulty reading signs and menus, so he wondered what he could use that would help him to navigate the foreign land and language. After trying paper and electronic translators and deeming both too slow, Good resorted to the internet, but found to his dismay that the charges to access the web in foreign countries were much too high.

If only Good had already possessed Word Lens on his phone, his trip would have been seamless. The application eliminates every foreign traveling dilemma. It must of course be downloaded – this is free and there is a demo mode that works rather well to show the app’s capabilities – and then in-app language packs must be bought

Each language pack translates to and from English and costs $4.99. Spanish, French, Italian, German, and Portuguese are currently the available languages on Word Lens.

From there, the app works just as previously described. Point the phone camera at the foreign text you want to translate and almost instantly on the screen a direct translation will appear. But the ultimate convenience of it all? No Internet is required to run the application.

Understandably, the media and technology worlds were gushing about Word Lens upon its release. The New York Times gave it a Pogie award, an honor for what those at the paper deem one of the ten best tech ideas of the year.

Wired.com had nothing but good things to say, writing; “Word Lens is a taste of science fiction.” The ratings for the app on iTunes are 4.5 out of 5 stars. It seems most reviews reflect happy customers as well.

People who may not be so thrilled by Word Lens, however, can be found right here at New Trier. For teachers, this application presents a threat to academic integrity.

Much like Google Translate, which can take large bodies of text and translate them at once, Word Lens can process many words at the same time. The application is ever more accessible to students, without Internet and direct from a phone so it is practically inconspicuous.

While phones certainly aren’t allowed in class, the outside price comparable of buying Word Lens as opposed to a paper dictionary is significant, and Word Lens ultimately would require much less work to operate than looking up individual words and phrases by hand.

Students feel Word Lens would be a valuable tool for translating foreign texts. Senior, Cassidy Miller, said, “I would love to have that app. That would be so helpful for translating large bodies of French and other languages.”

On the other hand, teachers reacted to Word Lens with reasonable concern.

“I am kind of against the use of this application for school work. Students at a certain level are expected to match learning goals and academic integrity. You can use a dictionary to look up a single word or text, but you shouldn’t look up full paragraphs.

“Students don’t learn from that and it’s also not their work; it’s a form of plagiarism,” said German teacher Venera Stabinsky. “Having said that, I think this would probably be a nice application for traveling purposes.”

While Word Lens appears is a wonderful resource for a worldly traveler, it may not be as necessary or helpful in schools. While students yearn for it, teachers find it a hindrance, and in the end, the best way to learn is not by letting technology do the work for you.