Have you ever been stuck in a foreign country, unable to decipher a street sign, map or menu item? Well, world travelers can now rejoice because an enterprising 28-year-old entrepreneur and his mom have created an iPhone app to solve that pressing problem.

The 99 cent app is called PicTranslator, and it uses an optical character recognition technology to translate words that an iPhone user snaps with the built-in camera.

That means a no swimming sign on a beach in Greece or a pasta dish with meatballs on an Italian menu could be translated into English in less than a minute. In some cases -- including for Spanish, German, Italian French and Portuguese - it also offers audio tips on pronunciation of the words.

But the PicTranslator app doesn't always work, with users told to avoid shadows and glares as well as angled photos. And the founders admit that they are working out some of the bugs, which some reviewers are certainly pointing out in the App store.

Justin Wilcox, one of the two 28-year-old founders of Fotozio, the creator of the app, came up with idea about 15 years ago when he was sitting on a plane and noted that the "Fasten Seat Belt" sign only appeared in English.

"This was about the same time that (optical character recognition) software had first become available with flat-bed scanners and I thought: 'Wouldn’t it be cool if you could take a picture of text and have it translated into a language you spoke?'” said Wilcox

The idea stuck with Wilcox who earlier this year started rooting around the App store looking for something that did the trick. He couldn't find anything that completely fit his needs, so he started kicking around the idea with his partner Aaron Jensen and his mom, Terry Wilcox.

There's another app from Codium Labs called Babelshot that's also in the space, but Wilcox said it doesn't have pronunciation features and the character reading isn't as accurate.

At this point, PicTranslator is available for 16 languages and it only translates words into English, not the other way around. But the developers are working on another version of the app that would translate any of the 16 languages in the system into 40 other languages.

There is one potential bottleneck to the app, which Wilcox recognizes. International data plans aren't cheap, which means costs could add up for those who wanted to decipher every word on the menu.

"We do everything we can to minimize file size and traffic to/from the phone to keep costs down, but we’re hopeful data rates, like they have domestically, will decrease overtime internationally," he said.

Here's Jensen giving the PicTranslator service a try at Le Pichet in downtown Seattle.