Type an SMS message in English and receive a text back with its Spanish or Chinese translation. Muuzii came out of AT&T’s developer program, but it plans to expand to more countries and carriers this year.

An interesting new Spanish and Chinese translation service called Muuzii has made its way to AT&T’s 2G network. Unlike other app-based translators, Muuzii performs its translations using the most basic data channel on the phone: SMS.

Subscribers simply type an English phrase in a text message and send it to a Muuzii short code, and get back a Spanish or Chinese translation (depending on which language you register for). The service will also preform Spanish-to-English translations, though not Chinese-to-English.

There are definite advantages to SMS as a translation tool: It’s nearly universally available and doesn’t rely on the phone’s fickle data connection. It also means the service works on even the most basic phones – all it needs is an SMS client. The company also offers an enhanced service called Muuzii Speak, which will return an audio translation embedded in an MMS message. That audio file can be played in either an MMS client or a separate Android Muuzii app.

An example of three Muuzii services: Spanish to English, English to Spanish and Muuzii Speak (Source: Muuzii)

The core SMS service costs $2.99 a month, while the MMS audio translation service is is $3.99. Both services will be charged directly to your AT&T bill. More.

See: Gigaom

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