One of the more daunting aspects of international travel is communicating in a country where you don't speak the language. How much does that cost? Where is that train going? Where am I?

Google is looking to ease the culture shock with an iPhone version of its Translate offering. Not quite sure how to tell a taxi driver you need to go to the airport? Type in the English phrase and Translate for the iPhone will spit out your translation.

The app was developed in part by Allen Hutchinson, a Google software engineer who worked on the offering to help him during a trip to Germany and Italy.

"I tried an early version of this interface out on my trip and it was great -- although my pronunciation wasn't," he wrote in a blog post. "So every now and then, I would just hold up my phone to let people read what I couldn't."

Translate, a Web-based interface that translates words and phrases that are typed in by the user, currently supports 24 languages, including Arabic, Chinese, German, Italian, and Russian - all of which will be available via the iPhone app, Hutchinson wrote.

The add-on will store previous translations that will be accessible even when you're not on the local data network.

"If you're wondering about data costs, I found that I could get between 200 and 400 translations in 1MB of data download," Hutchinson wrote. "Although we don't charge for this service, your carrier may charge for the data usage so be sure to know what your roaming rates are. For my plan, I found that I could translate 400 phrases for less than $10 when roaming internationally."

Um, yeah. I have AT&T and racked up $150 in data charges accessing the Internet on my BlackBerry in Italy earlier this year. Whoops.

Hutchinson suggested it might be useful for those of you currently getting yourself lost at the Olympics in Beijing, but you might want to check with AT&T to see if you actually get service because; I had no access while I was there a year ago.