A new app just hit the iTunes App Store with the slightly unassuming name “Word Lens.” You may think it’s got something to do with typography or photography…but you’d only be partly right. It also instantly translates Spanish to English.

What the app does is take the image stream from the iPhone’s camera, apply real-time image processing and pattern recognition tricks to it, and it then “plays” with any text it finds in the scene before displaying it on the iPhone’s screen.

Not impressed by the description? Think again: Quest Visual, the company behind it, calls it a “real time translating app” and begs you to “turn your iPhone into the dictionary of the future–now!” The exclamation point may be warranted. Because what Word Lens does to text held before iPhone’s cam, conjures thoughts of the best sci-fi movies.

The app comes with a toy option that lets you reverse words it recognizes in the scene, or delete them altogether, but you can pay to download a Spanish-to-English translation package that instantly turns the words on, say, a menu, into text you can understand.